Abby Mendelson
Witness to Our Times

Nova in Miami

It was Simchas Torah, 5784, a day designed for dancing, with Sifrei Torahs or each other, sacred or secular.  A day for gladness, a day for joy.

Until 6:29, when the sun rose and the missiles began.

And the monsters arrived.

Since then, I’ve been to the Nova Music Festival site three times, found it beautiful and brutal, a soulful shrine, a quiet, retrospective place.

Currently, there are few artifacts at the site, no videos.  While the very silence speaks sadly, I wanted more – more humanity, more sound.  So when I read about the traveling Nova exhibition, and found that I would be close to it on a family visit to Florida, I immediately booked tickets.

Despite knowing the story, despite tears already shed, I was both profoundly touched and uplifted by the exhibition, its three-dimensional humanity, its unexpected coda.

The challenge for any historical exhibition is to make a time not only live but also vital.  Here, the creators have succeeded brilliantly, I think.  Wisely allowing the recovered artifacts to speak for themselves, seeing, touching (actually suggested) these everyday items – cigarette packs and soda cans, cell phones and Campari bottles, chairs and tents — made the experience so much more visceral than merely seeing them at the usual museum distance.

Appropriately chilling, many truncated videos presented the frightened and the doomed, as well as their killers.  Adding depth and dimension were testimonies from many who searched for bodies and clues to the missing, mutilated, and murdered.

Walking through, I broke down twice.  The first was when a hardened Hatzalah veteran choked up, saying that he’d never seen anything like it, that the experience would haunt him for the rest of his life.  As a long-time Chevra Kadishah member, I, too, have seen – and touched – sorrowful, unspeakable things.  Listening to him, hearing the pian in his voice, I hurt for how horrible this must have been.

Closing my eyes, I hoped the tears would stop.

The second time was before a table strewn with shoes.  Shoes abandoned, shoes recovered.  Simply shoes.

Yet for anyone who’s been to Auschwitz, and other Shoah death factories, there’s nothing simple about shoes.  Shoes, a worn, black, odiferous symbol of how the Nazis stole everything – everything – from us.

At Maidanek, an entire barracks, three-tiered bunks encased in chicken wire, is filled with thousands of shoes.  Shoes piled floor to ceiling, the human odor still present.  Shoes upon shoes, marching off into the darkness.

When I was there, a quarter-century ago, I felt impelled to walk to the back of the barracks, lit only by the sunlight at the door.  Of course, I knew there were no surprises there, nothing but shoes.

Still, I walked into the darkness.  At the end, I turned toward the light, which seemed very far away.

In the darkness and the stench, I unreasonably feared the door would close, imprisoning me forever.  Wanting to run out, I instead walked slowly toward the light, fearing what was behind me.  Fearing for my sanity.  For everything decent I had ever known.  Forcing myself to be calm, I pretended that everything I once thought about life was true, that I wasn’t hearing the howls of the dead.  Finally, after an eternity, I returned to the bright sunlight, where I wept.

The Nova shoes caused me to stop and sob a second time.

At the site last November I stared at staves with the victims’ photos and quoted William Butler Yeats to Matisyahu Glassman, our madrich.  “What rough beast,” I gestured, “it’s hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

Rightly demurring, Glassman shook his head.  “To call them beasts,” he countered, “or monsters, is incorrect.  It robs them of their humanity, their free choice, and the consequences of that choice.  To render them less than human diminishes their evil, their choice of evil.  Their responsibility for creating this carnage.  This fully human crime.”

If that choice resides deep in their genetic code, then deep in ours, by contrast, is our impulse, our choice, to take a tragedy, a slaughter beyond comprehension, and transform it into a force for good, a vector for healing and help.

While the incinerated cars, bullet-riddled toilets, scavenged make-up bags demonstrate the power of the mundane to move us, the power of loss motivates us, inspires us to create something better.  If the Nova vow, we will dance again, stands as a call to action, in the meantime they are already doing much more.  Creating a foundation, Nova will offer counseling, rehabilitation services, and more, to the survivors and all the families.

Like all of Jewish life, yizkor, is not a look back, not a static moment in time, but instead a movement forward.  At Nova, they’ll not only dance.  They’ll heal.

Leaving the exhibition, I consideration a last lesson.  In this world there are far too many people who insist on defining themselves as perpetual victims.  That certainly isn’t us.  We may have been victimized on October 7, just as we were once enslaved in Egypt, and in the Holocaust, but we are hardly victims.  Just as we are not slaves.  Instead, we are builders, creators.  That is how we have transformed mayhem and murder at an early morning rave.

If that isn’t our history for the past three thousand years, I don’t know what is.

About the Author
I have been a regularly published author for a half-century. I regularly write about Pittsburgh, Israel, and Jewish affairs. I hold a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh. As an Aleph Institute Rabbi, I have regularly volunteered as a chaplain for Jewish inmates for more than 20 years. I have taught Jewish history, literature, and Torah, and assorted topics for a half-century.
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