I used to walk past the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach when it was still being built in the late 1980s, just a few blocks from where my mother and I shared a small apartment.

Back then, little more than scaffolding was visible as the giant bronze sculpture at the heart of the memorial, the Sculpture of Love and Anguish, took shape. Slowly, the 42-foot, outstretched arm tattooed with an Auschwitz number began reaching for the skies over Miami Beach, while dozens of emaciated human figures clung to it and each other; a naked woman holding onto her baby; a man’s face contorted in agony; scores of desperate Jews grasping, clawing, straining toward the heavens. 

The sculpture shocked me when I first gazed upon it in its entirety as a 10-year-old boy. Thirty-four years later, I still cannot forget that tattooed arm. To my mind, it is the most haunting, beautiful, visceral, and emotionally devastating memorial in America today to the Holocaust’s six million martyrs.

The memorial was conceived in 1984 by Holocaust survivors who had rebuilt their lives on Miami Beach, and brilliantly designed by architect Kenneth Treister. He said the arm represented his portrayal of a scene from hell frozen in bronze; the final reaching out of a dying person, according to the memorial’s website. 

“One day, a man or a woman will enter this sanctuary of remembrance and wonder: Was it all true? Were the killers really that cruel? And the victims that helpless? That lonely? That abandoned?” Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel said at the dedication ceremony when the memorial opened in 1990.

“Will this museum, or any other, bigger or smaller, make a difference? I hope that visitors will bring their children. I hope they will look at the pictures. Pictures: Old, emaciated grandparents lying in the street. Naked mothers shielding their children. A group of SS men enjoying themselves while tormenting an old man, who looks like my grandfather, and everyone else’s.”

Wiesel continued: “Look at his face. Look at all the faces. Look and you will realize that there existed a suffering that transcended suffering. Woe unto us, for the tragedy which this museum is trying to integrate is beyond words, and beyond imagination, but not beyond memory. And only those who were there know, will know, what it meant being there.” 

For decades, the upstretched arm has stood as a warning about what can happen when anti-Jewish hatred — humanity’s oldest bigotry — is allowed to mutate and spread. Yet critics of Treister’s sculpture that first year called it “grotesque” and a “brutal intrusion on the cityscape.” Holocaust survivors and committee members responded that this was exactly the point of the piece, according to the memorial’s official history.

“To one who would say it is not acceptable, not tasteful, not expressive, I would ask, what would he find acceptable? Would he find it acceptable for me to stand on a street corner and weep?” asked founding committee member and Holocaust survivor David Schaecter.

On October 26, 2025, his words — and the lessons of the sculpture —  took on new meaning.

In a ceremony that received little attention outside South Florida’s Jewish community — and virtually no press coverage — the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach became the first in the world to permanently engrave the names of the victims murdered in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre in Israel. 

Their names were carved in Hebrew and English and added to the memorial’s walls of remembrance.

Visitors now encounter martyrs from two defining moments in modern Jewish history, connected in a way that powerfully, tastefully honors both. 

At the unveiling of the names, Holocaust survivors stood side by side with October 7 families and survivors, including Omer Shem Tov, enacting a moving tribute to Jewish resilience, memory, and honor.

Sheri Zvi, CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach, said the connection was clear to those who survived the Nazi-led genocide. 

“Our survivors immediately recognized the echoes of their own past,” she said. “Jewish blood was once again shed simply because of who they were.”

The Holocaust, she suggested, served as a warning for the post-October 7 world of today.

“This Memorial has always stood as a testament to the dangers of hatred, silence and dehumanization,” Zvi said. “The inclusion of the October 7 names is a call to conscience — reminding us that ‘Never Again’ cannot be simply spoken; it must be lived.”

Today, six months after that ceremony on Miami Beach, it is even clearer that the lessons of October 7 must be taught, studied, and relentlessly spoken and written about until they are emblazoned in the minds of our non-Jewish brethren — especially children — if we are to avoid a second Holocaust.

Because the ideological groundwork for a new genocide of Jews is being laid today. 

The hatred now endemic across the West is not the racial antisemitism of pre-war Europe, but an insidious, antizionist bigotry cultivated by modern Islamists and Soviet and Nazi-aligned Arab propagandists before them — an ideology that seeks the genocide of Israelis, the killing of “Zionists,” and the targeting of pro-Israel Jews as proxies for both. 

The atrocities of October 7 were shocking; Israeli children incinerated in fire by Hamas, family members tortured and murdered before one other’s eyes, young Jews hunted down and executed at a music festival, women raped by groups of terrorists who mutilated their bodies before shooting them, entire communities overrun by sadistic killers who seemed to walk out of a medieval history book. These images should be fixed in public memory as fact.

Instead, within days of the attacks, these horrifying crimes against Jews began to be minimized, denied, and inverted to blame their victims. This happened not on the fringes of Western societies, but in their mainstream; across university campuses, in left-wing activist spaces, and on social media accounts worldwide. A new age of anti-Jewish hatred was quickly unloosed, the poisonous ideology of antizionist bigotry disguised as “progressivism” as it spread like a pathogen across the West, turning impressionable mobs against Jews throughout the Diaspora.

Today, we Jews who love our ancestral homeland are treated not as humans by antizionists, but rather as stand-ins for Israel; “genocidal” pariahs and “colonizers” who exist to be demonized, harassed, attacked, and purged from public life in a global effort to solve the world’s “Zionist” problem. 

Here in the U.S., antizionist libels and propaganda are being disseminated by operatives backed by Qatar, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Russia, China, and an army of antizionist hate-mongers on the global left and so-called “woke right.” Anti-Israel NGOs, the UN, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Democratic Socialists of America, and broadcasters like Tucker Carlson have all helped antizionism capture the minds of young Americans, many of whom are encountering October 7 not through documentation, classrooms, or survivor testimony, but through TikTok videos, Instagram posts, and falsified narratives that strip away vital context and invert victim and perpetrator.

In this manufactured, antizionist version of reality, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is justified, celebrated, and fetishized, with racialized propaganda and hate filling the space where facts and memory should be.

This widespread ignorance is not being corrected by most of what passes for mainstream discourse and American news coverage. In both realms, antizionist framing, omissions, and disinformation serve to create a social permission structure in which inflicting violence against “Zionists” feels, to many, like righteous social justice.

That is why the inclusion of October 7 victims on Miami Beach’s Holocaust memorial was so important, and why it should serve as an example for other museums, educators, schools, and civic spaces across the U.S.

There have been a handful of permanent October 7 memorials erected across the country, including a commemorative bench dedicated this weekend in New York City’s Central Park. The first permanent October 7 memorial in North America was unveiled on October 29, 2025, at Shalom Baruch Cemetery in Humble, Texas. It features a 12-foot Star of David sculpture and a shrapnel monument. But October 7 memorials in the West remain mostly scattered and easy to overlook.

What is needed is something closer to what stands in Miami Beach.

Something permanent, shocking, and impossible to forget. Even for a 10-year-old kid gazing upon it for the first time.

The survivors who conceived of the Miami Beach memorial understood what happens when ideology trumps truth. They knew that even the most documented history can be questioned, distorted, or denied if it is not placed front and center and taught to the world, one generation after the next. It is no coincidence that the flood of antizionist propaganda brainwashing our younger generations has coincided with an equally alarming explosion of Holocaust minimization, distortion, and denial as the Shoah drifts further from public memory. 

World Jewry is the target of an unprecedented propaganda war, and we have little time to waste if we are to stave off disaster.

The outstretched, tattooed arm on Miami Beach reminds us of our responsibility to teach about the lethal pathogen of Jew-hatred and its consequences through the prism of October 7. The facts of that terrible day must be discussed, studied, and dissected in Western teaching spaces just as the Holocaust was — and the two catastrophes understood as part of a genocidal continuum — lest the wave of hatred threatening Jewish life across the globe overtake us all. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)