Memory Under the Sun. The Memorial and Memento

More on The Jerusalem Ballet’s Florida tour

I see biblical shadows tangled with Miami’s heat and salt.
Miami is a city where life runs across the surface of history. Yet in one of its parks, a hand reaches up to the sky.
This hand—The Holocaust Memorial, created by sculptor Kenneth Treister in 1990—is made of bronze, yet seems cast from cooled sunlight. From it, bodies sprout—not sculptures, but remnants of breath, as if stone suddenly remembered it once had flesh.

                                     Photo by Julia Shachal

During The Jerusalem Ballet’s recent tour of Florida, we discovered that Miami now has not only the Holocaust Memorial, but also a monument to the victims of October 7 — two griefs divided by decades; so much time has passed, and still the world repeats the same gesture.
It was to these two symbols that they brought the dancers who, later that evening, would perform Memento—a ballet about Franciszka Mann, the ballerina who danced in Auschwitz’s gas chamber and, mid-dance, shot two Nazi officers, refusing to leave this world quietly.
Like so many extraordinary stories, it was discovered and transformed into ballet by Nadya Timofeyeva.

Through the fingers of that hand the sky gleams—as if it were not a blue dome, but a vein of time, that same vein of eternity where marble and flesh become the same substance.
The tropical sun, one that cannot bear memory, burns away everything except shadow.
Here, everything lives in the past tense, even the light.

                                   Photos by Julia Shachal

The tropics are a strange place for mourning. Everything here grows, breathes; palms shed their leaves like pages of a letter written in green ink by the wind.
Yet here, at the edge of a cheerful street smelling of sunscreen and roasted corn, silence suddenly rises—so dense it feels as if one could write a name with it.
Or many names, like those on the monument to the victims of October 7 in Miami Beach, which few have heard of. If not for The Jerusalem Ballet’s performances, I wouldn’t have known either.
And there you stand—between the ocean and the bronze hand—listening as every wave repeats: again, again, again.
Though perhaps it ought to say, how long, instead.

The nearby ocean isn’t as innocent as it seems: it remembers the ships that refused refugees; it remembers the silence in which names vanished.
In the tropical air, heavy with salt and sound, silence rings like static, like the shadow left after a scream. Mandelstam would probably whisper something about “the century the wolfhound,” about “the torn-out tongue” and “memory groping in the dark.”
He understood this language of bodies; he would have thought the hand was a wound turned vertical.
The tropical sun, hostile to mourning, scorches the bronze to white heat—and for a moment it seems the monument breathes.
Tourists pass by. Some stop to take pictures. The most striking ones are those where the hand is reflected in the water.
And Miami Beach, a city without shadows, suddenly becomes a place where shadow and light have reconciled.

                                      Photo by Julia Shachal

That evening, The Jerusalem Ballet performed Memento in Boca Raton, not far from Miami. If I were given to grand words, I might say it was no longer just a ballet about the Holocaust, nor only about Franciszka Mann—but the breathing of that same hand reaching toward the sky, and of all those who can no longer dance.
In the sunlit paradise, where palm shadows fall like lines crossed out of memory, Franciszka Mann once again raised her hand against the Nazi officers. She was not reaching upward—she was firing.
From ashes—a leap; from horror—an arabesque. What a cruel and uncanny rhyme.
But I’m not inclined to pathos, so I’ll simply say that before Memento, the soloists of The Jerusalem Ballet and the students of the FAU University Dance Department performed in a special piece by Nadya Timofeyeva set to the music from Schindler’s List. And after Memento, they came out for bows to “Hatikvah.” The audience stood and sang along—and almost everyone wept.
Remarkably—and rare for our times—there wasn’t a single antisemitic incident. Not one, in two weeks of touring.

                                  Photo by Nadya Timofeyeva

In art, a hand is always the boundary between action and prayer—from David’s marble hand to Rembrandt’s trembling brush in The Return of the Prodigal Son.
The hand, it seems to me, speaks of human presence in the world.
And yet, there is also that hand from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— the moment between life and its beginning, the distance between God and man, the touch that never quite happens.
But the bronze hand on Meridian Avenue, reaching skyward and wrapped in hundreds of human figures, tells instead of the presence of the inhuman within the world.
In Treister’s memorial, the hand becomes an anthropology of pain—the entire history of the twentieth century compressed into a single gesture.
And in Nadya Timofeyeva’s ballet about the Polish-Jewish dancer Franciszka Mann, one can also trace the story of a hand—a hand that resists, dances, seizes a weapon, turning the final moment into movement, into the only thing left to do.

Photos courtesy of Yulia Shachal and The Jerusalem Ballet