How Do We Remember? Reflections from Kikar Dizengoff

The past few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we remember, and how we keep building. Thank Gd, it’s been over a month since all of our living hostages came home (with three bodies still being held in Gaza), and there’s finally some semblance of normalcy returning to our days. The skies are opening up again. People are taking weekend trips. Cafés are full. And although so many are still serving in Miluim, and so many families are still rebuilding their lives, the immediate, suffocating pressure of war feels slightly less present.

We’ve lived through so much hardship and pain, and we’ve witnessed real, open miracles. And now, somehow, we’re expected to open our laptops on Sunday morning and answer emails as if our inner worlds haven’t been completely rearranged.

So where do we go from here?
What actually changed?
And how do we turn these last two years into sustainable habits of memory rather than a brief burst of collective emotion?

One piece of this, at least for me, is the question of place. What happens when memory becomes rooted in physical, public space rather than just in our private grief? I keep coming back to Kikar Dizengoff in Tel Aviv, not just as a fun place to sit and get coffee, but as a mirror of who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.

On Yom Kippur 2023, just a week before October 7th, the Kikar was a symbol of everything that felt broken here. Religious vs. anti-religious. Public outrage over public prayer. People shouting at each other, crying, pulling away. It was heartbreaking and confusing, and I remember thinking: if even this shared space can’t hold us together, what can?

But then, almost overnight, the Kikar transformed. On October 8th, it became a place of urgency - a massive, improvised logistics center where strangers packed boxes together for evacuees and soldiers. There was no asking who was religious or secular. No ideological tests. Just hands carrying bags of rice, moving crates of clothes, making room for more volunteers.

And then, slowly, it became something else:
A shrine.
A memorial.
A site of longing and hope.
A place that forced us to stop moving, even if just for a moment, and look directly at what and who we’ve lost.

Today, the Kikar is lined with framed photos of soldiers who gave their lives for our safety, for the return of our hostages, for the possibility of peace in this country. People pause there on their morning run. Parents push strollers through it. Tourists stop to ask questions. Life moves through the memorial, around it, alongside it.

But it raises questions we rarely ask out loud:

How long do these photos stay?
Who takes care of them?
At what point do they stop being a memorial and start becoming background noise?
What happens to memory when it stays in the same place for too long, or not long enough?

And maybe more importantly:
What responsibility do we have not just to remember - but to shape how we remember?

Video taken in Kikar Dizengoff, September 5, 2025

Because spontaneous memorials are powerful, but they are, by definition, temporary. They are the first draft of memory. They show our raw emotion, not our long-term intention. And at some point, every society must decide what it wants to mark, what it wants to teach, and what story it wants future generations to inherit.

Maybe the memorial we build (if we do build one) isn’t actually for us. Maybe it’s for the people who will stand in this square twenty or fifty years from now, trying to make sense of what all of this meant.

In that sense, maybe memorials are less about the past and more about the bridge we create for the future.

And if that’s true, then the work ahead of us is not simply deciding what belongs in the square. It’s deciding what values we want to reflect in the Kikar: solidarity, courage, dignity, responsibility, the sanctity of life. A memorial isn’t a stone or a plaque, it’s a choice. A choice about what we believe must never be forgotten, and what we hope will guide us long after the urgency of this moment fades.

And maybe that’s the invitation of Kikar Dizengoff today - to move from reaction to intention. To ask not just how we remember, but why we remember.

And maybe, years from now, when people cross the square and pause for just a moment, they’ll feel something of this time, the weight and the hope, still living quietly in the space.