I am in the educator cohort at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. The Museum is on Lloyd Street in the Jonestown neighborhood of Baltimore. The Museum exists to tell the story of the Jewish People in the DMV and in America as a whole. It does this with permanent exhibits on immigration, culture, and faith. The museum also manages two historic synagogues. The Lloyd Street Synagogue is across the street. It was built in 1845 and hosted immigrant congregations up until 1960. It is Maryland’s oldest synagogue. I have unfortunately never been in it, since it has been under construction the entire time I have been with the Museum. The second synagogue is the B’Nai Israel Synagogue is a beautiful piece of architecture that was built in 1876 and it is right next to the museum. It originally hosted a congregation of Russian Immigrants. In the 1980s, it was restored and is in use yet again.
I have been working at the museum since April and, as an Educator, I have had two main responsibilities. The first and primary purpose of my position is to give educational presentations about Jewish history to whomever may reserve my time. The majority of those who do are middle and high school classes. There are three presentations that I give. My favorite presentation to give is about the Holocaust Memory Project. This was a project where the Museum worked alongside the Human Element Project to collect testimonies of holocaust survivors living in Maryland and DC. The project asked survivors to make collages that captured their experiences surviving the holocaust and their lives afterwards. I lead the group through the lives, the stories, and the collages of two of the survivors that were worked with. The second presentation is an introduction to Judaism. It is a presentation that is primarily targeted towards young children. It introduces the basic features of Judaism and Jewish traditions by showing pictures from the Lloyd Street Synagogue. I find this project to be an important one as much of anti-semitism is predicated upon the "foreignness" of Jewish people, and introducing people to its customs at a young age can hopefully help deconstruct some of these antisemitic myths. I also find this presentation to be one of the more difficult to give, primarily because I am not Jewish and some of the pronunciations are difficult for me. The final presentation that I have to give is about Jewish immigration to Baltimore. It discusses why Jewish immigrants, primarily from Europe, might have left and how they built community in the Baltimore area and specifically in Jonestown, where the Museum is located. In an era where immigration is a contentious topic of discussion, I find that it is important to be able to discuss other examples of immigration. I hope when I give this presentation that the audience, again usually school-age children, might have a more open mind to the reasons that people choose to leave their homes and to build new ones in our communities.
My primary responsibility of giving presentations about Jewish history, leads us into a discussion of my second responsibility, which is to always be learning new things about that history. When I am not giving the presentations, I am practicing them and studying the material. More than this, I have had the pleasure of attending conferences for holocaust educators. The first being the asynchronous Belfer National Conference and the Holocaust Educators’ Conference in Towson. I found both to be wonderful learning experiences however I really enjoyed the latter especially since I was able to meet other people in the field and learn more about novel research in holocaust and genocide studies.
Overall, my experience at the Jewish Museum of Maryland has been a delight. I have found it to be both enjoyable and incredibly moving. In an era where antisemitic and all other kinds of prejudice and violence are on the rise across the globe, I find my work and my experience to be extremely important.
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