Orange Blossom Award: Keeping the Light On, Florida Holocaust Museum

After a year of careful, deliberate work, the staff of the Florida Holocaust Museum reopened more than a building — they reopened a space for memory, education, and civic responsibility. Photo credit: Florida Holocaust Museum

by Avery Anderson

This Orange Blossom isn’t for a ribbon cutting.
It’s for the quiet, exacting, collective work it took to reopen the Florida Holocaust Museum in a year when memory itself feels under threat.

Behind the polished cases and calibrated lighting was a staff doing something harder than renovation. They were re-opening a moral space—carefully, responsibly, and with an eye toward the future—at a moment when antisemitism is rising, Holocaust denial is loud, and attention is fragile.

They did it anyway.

They placed a Nazi-era boxcar beside a Danish rescue boat, refusing spectacle in favor of meaning. They built a visitor experience that asks for reckoning, not consumption. They expanded survivor testimony so voices can keep answering questions long after those voices can no longer be in the room. They welcomed Elie Wiesel’s legacy not as a trophy, but as a responsibility. They reopened not to nostalgia—but to now.

This is the kind of labor that doesn’t show up in headlines. It happens in meetings about wording and placement. In decisions about tone. In the discipline of saying no to shortcuts. In the patience of educators, the vigilance of curators, the steadiness of visitor services, the coordination of operations, and the resolve of a team that understands the stakes.

In a rapidly changing downtown—cranes rising, nightlife humming—the museum stands as a counterweight. A place that slows you down. A place that insists history is not abstract. A place that says remembrance is an active verb.

The staff didn’t just reopen a building.
They reopened a conversation across generations.
They reopened a responsibility to be upstanders.
They reopened a space where everybody is welcome—and nobody gets to look away.

Today’s Orange Blossom goes to the people who held the memory open while the doors were closed—and then opened both with care.

What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?

A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.