Hug

January 16, 2025 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

“I knew we would hug.” This is what Hedva Rokach, our visiting Israeli Artist, said to me as we drove to Portland from Logan Airport last Sunday. We had, indeed, hugged and hugged fiercely and long the minute she and her partner, Itay, met me and my husband, Nick, at the terminal gate. “Yes,” I agreed, “I knew we would hug, too.”

True, Hedva and I were not strangers. We had communicated for months via Zoom and email as we worked out the countless details involved in bringing her photography exhibition, Japanese Sushi Girls, from the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Haifa, Israel to the Maine Jewish Museum, and in arranging for Hedva and Itay to stay in Maine for six weeks. But this was the first time we had met in person, and it was as if we had been friends for decades.

It’s been less than a week since that first hug, but there have been many more hugs since. Hugs of joy and excitement, and hugs of comfort and consolation mirroring the intense and varied outpouring of responses to Hedva’s exhibition. I have been personally barraged with devastating and hateful emails that have, unfortunately, forced me to contact the police and heighten security at the Museum. We also experienced a public protest of the exhibition, something that saddened us even as we acknowledged the First Amendment right to peaceful public protest.

On the flip side, we have been inundated with love and support from members of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities, many of whom have made first-time donations to the Museum in honor of Hedva and Japanese Sushi Girls. Hedva’s Artist Talk was sold out and brilliantly received. And, in a surprising twist, the controversy over the exhibition has led to an opening for positive dialogue across differences – I hope to be able to report more on this happy development in a later Museum missive.

The wildly divergent reactions to Japanese Sushi Girls are reflective of these polarizing times. And in polarizing times, it is tempting to view the world exclusively through a political lens. But the Maine Jewish Museum is not a political organization, and Japanese Sushi Girls – the title of which was chosen by the sushi makers, themselves, because it was how they signed the notes accompanying their sushi packages – is not a commentary on the political situation in Israel and Gaza. Rather, the exhibition sheds light on the little-known Japanese immigrant community in Israel and their deeply human and intrinsically nurturing response in the immediate aftermath of October 7 (Hedva photographed them the final time they made sushi).

We invite you to visit our Museum to check out Japanese Sushi Girls and all our art and historic exhibitions, including The Shifting Sands of Somalia  by Maine-based photographer Audrey Gottlieb, who documented the aid mission in Somalia in 1993 and was part of the United Nations effort to assist the war-torn and starving Muslim community during the Black Hawk Down era. Through these exhibitions, we hope to break down false binaries and bring disparate individuals and groups together through our common humanity. There is more uniting us than dividing us if we allow ourselves to be open-minded and open-hearted, and compassion and empathy are not a zero-sum game.

Praying for the safe return of all the hostages, an end to the war in Gaza, and lasting peace in the region.

Warmly,

Dawn

Dawn LaRochelle
Executive Director