A Detour Into Our Own History

We had a few hours to fill before catching the Brightline back to Orlando. It was the tail end of our 10th wedding anniversary weekend in Miami, and we’d spent it the way we had planned: eating at restaurants I’d researched for weeks, walking aimlessly through shops, and doing absolutely nothing productive. The kind of weekend you earn after a decade of marriage and two small kids.

“I kind of want to go to the Jewish Museum of Florida,” I said.

“Let’s do it,” my husband Kostya said.

We share a love of learning about both the future and the past. So what better time than during our anniversary celebration to learn about our own history?

We walked from South Beach and found exactly what you’d hope for: a gorgeous old synagogue converted into a museum, full of stories.

In the lobby, a warm, white-haired museum worker named Eva greeted us from behind the gift shop counter. Kostya, who immigrated to Orlando from Ukraine at nine years old, started chatting with her in Russian. We told her we were from Orlando, and that years ago, Kostya’s family had been featured in the Kehillah exhibit on the history of Jewish Orlando at the Orange County Regional History Center, which also happens to be where we got married.

Eva walked straight to a shelf, pulled down Marcia Jo Zerivitz’s beautiful tome, Jews of Florida: Centuries of Stories, and flipped to the index. “What’s the last name?” she asked.

“Kimlat,” Kostya said.

Her finger traced it immediately: Kimlat, Boris! Kostya turned to the page number next to his father’s name, and there was a photo of Kostya, himself, as a little boy with his sister, parents, grandmother, and the family dog. The whole story of their immigration was right there. Even my name was included.

We stood there in the lobby of a museum we’d almost skipped, on our anniversary trip, holding a history book that held our family inside it.

We wandered the exhibits, finding Central Florida connections everywhere. A Hanukkah menorah used by Lieutenant Commander Barbara Fieldman of Winter Park during Operation Desert Storm. An official NASCAR referee shirt from Daytona Beach’s Louis Ossinsky, who helped found the motorsport from his family’s living room in 1948. A Torah scroll carried out of Russia by a boy whose parents faked his death to save him from the czar’s army, before he eventually found himself in Florida.

We made it back to the train station just in time, with plenty of stories to take aboard.