My sister Margo flew down from Toronto for a few days, before we embark on our cruise from Fort Lauderdale.

How strange to our (late) parents it would have seemed, she commented while swimming in the warm Atlantic, that we meet davka here, in Hollywood Florida. With four siblings, now scattered across four continents, we make the effort to meet whenever, wherever possible!

Each visit to America surprises me anew with its excess and scale. “Our” condo is but one of countless ginormous oceanfront towers, each brimming with vacationers.

Spanish everywhere. Many no English at all. They and Canadian Jewry comprise most visitors we bump into. Snowbirds from Montreal and Toronto, proudly, with no apparent anxiety, displaying their Jewishness. Margo reminded me to not speak to Ray in Hebrew (so others don’t understand). Rather switch to Afrikaans! Friday on the beach, this small plane continuously flying past trailing the banner:  “BRING PEACE! LIGHT SHABBAT CANDLES 5.23 ❤️CHABAD. “

We wrote in 2020 about the deeply moving, haunting 1933-1945 Meridian Avenue, South Beach, Holocaust memorial, its poignancy reinforced given the approximately 25 000 survivors living around Miami. Now a new granite wall in English and Hebrew reflecting the catastrophic story of October 7 and beyond, listing names of all who perished “simply for being Jewish, Israeli or in Israel”. Has this tragedy, I wonder, been added to Holocaust memorials elsewhere?

A Muslim participant in the 2025 Galilee Dreamers delegation of Jewish and Palestinian Educators to Cape Town, recently reflected on how profoundly different and meaningful “our” Holocaust Museum is, relative, in his experience, to those in Israel: “In Cape Town it is much more about Universal values”.

Even at hedonistic South Beach, with its Art Deco beauty and pulsating night life, we can’t escape the heaviness and pain of our times, nor the questions they raise:

“This is our call: To remember, To resist hatred, To choose humanity, compassion and truth. MAY THEIR MEMORY BE A BLESSING”.

Who do these Meridian Avenue concluding words apply to?

Certainly to “us”. Yet there is no way through – unless also to “them”.