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02 July 2025
On July 1, during Federation Day at the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Gallery Place, Jackson Siegal of In-Rel Properties showed up with purpose.
He didn’t come alone. He brought his team: five maintenance men, straight from the job site, pockets full of screwdrivers and flashlights.
At the security checkpoint, they handed over their tools. A small, routine act. But upstairs, those everyday objects stood in quiet, haunting contrast to what lay on the tables.
Phones. Backpacks. Jewelry. Sandals. Not items people forgot, but belongings of those who were hunted, kidnapped, and murdered on October 7. Artifacts recovered from the site of the massacre.
Jackson’s team moved through the exhibit slowly, together. At the table of artifacts, a volunteer who had helped clean and catalog each item spoke with quiet steadiness, explaining what had happened on October 7. She had washed away the blood so the victims’ families wouldn’t have to see it. But she left the dust on the shoes. Just as they were found.
Dust from the earth where people danced, where thousands fled, where hundreds were murdered.
At one point, Jackson and the volunteer slipped into Hebrew. One of the younger workers leaned in to translate into Spanish for an older teammate. No one asked him to. He just did.
That kind of instinct—across languages, generations, and lived experience—is exactly what Federation Day was made to hold. A moment to show up. To witness. To carry memory together.
Jackson, who recently joined Federation’s Real Estate Network, didn’t say much. But the way he moved through the exhibit—asking questions, staying present—set the tone for his team.
Moments like this have defined the exhibit since it opened here in Greater Washington. Earlier in the run, a survivor spotted something he never expected: his hat.
Not just any hat. The one his friends always borrowed for pictures. The one that made people smile. The one everyone said made him look like Bruno Mars.
He left it there. Because it wasn’t just his anymore. It was part of the story now.
Something shifted for Jackson’s team, too. They didn’t just visit. They paid attention. They stayed with it.
They arrived with the tools of their trade. They left with something harder to name—but just as real. A story to carry. A truth to hold.
This is what it means to show up for one another. This is how memory becomes action.
Bringing the exhibit to Washington made space for moments like this—quiet, human, unforgettable. The kind that help us hold the truth and carry it forward, together.
