L’Dor V’Dor

May 20, 2026 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

So, earlier this month, I did a thing: I delivered the keynote address at the Cum Laude Ceremony at Hebron Academy. And while I would love to report that I handled this honor with perfect humility and grace, the truth is that being asked to give a keynote can make a girl’s head swell just a little bit.

Fine. More than a little bit.

(And yes, because several people asked: you can read the full speech here.)

What made the moment especially meaningful to me, though, had less to do with standing at a podium and more to do with the person who invited me there in the first place.

The invitation came from David Ruiz, the recently retired Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Hebron and my former boss at The MacDuffie School in Granby, MA. David moved to Maine first; I followed one year later, which sounds far more emotionally codependent than it actually was, I promise.

Back in our MacDuffie era, David’s office was directly across from mine, which meant that every Monday morning began the same way: I would stride into his office, and within thirty seconds we’d be railing against some fresh injustice unfolding somewhere in the world… before I inevitably pivoted to showing off my latest nail design, which David found wildly entertaining:

“Dawn, democracy is collapsing.”

“Yes, but have you seen my sparkly purple bumblebee mani?” [wiggles fingers]

David taught by example. He modeled what it means to wrestle with difficult truths without losing your humanity or your sense of humor.

Which made it feel wonderfully full-circle to stand in front of his students years later and talk about the Ampersand Project, MJM’s statewide initiative exploring the complexity of Jewish life in Maine and pushing back against reductionist binaries.

That’s l’dor v’dor.

The Hebrew phrase l’dor v’dor is usually translated as “from generation to generation,” but lately I’ve been thinking less about inheritance and more about ignition. About the way stories, values, art, culture, language, responsibility, recipes, and yes, occasionally zany personal aesthetics, move from person to person and community to community in ways we never fully anticipate.

That kind of passing-forward was on beautiful display a few weeks ago, when we hosted Numbers, Narratives, and Maine Jewish Life: A Colby Student Poster Session & Community Conversation, a collaboration between Colby College and the Museum that connected the findings of the 2024 Maine Jewish Community Study with the photographs, interviews, and stories of the Ampersand Project. Under the guidance of MJM Historian in Residence Rabbi Dr. David Freidenreich, students used the project to humanize and deepen the study’s demographic findings, pairing statistics with lived experience, research with faces, and scholarship with real people.

Suddenly, demographic research had a pulse.

What I loved most was the way the room kept crackling into conversation. People would stop at a student poster expecting numbers and charts and then suddenly find themselves in animated discussions about family history, belonging, interfaith identity, rural isolation, antisemitism, migration, or what it means to build Jewish community in Maine. It felt less like an academic convening and more like a community thinking out loud.

Our Delet educational initiative has been filled with moments like these lately. In April, we welcomed students from Crescent Park Elementary School in Bethel for our first-ever elementary school visit to the Museum. It was a joyful day of storytelling, exploration, creativity, and discovery that reminded all of us how curiosity begins early. Watching young students encounter Jewish history and culture as vibrant, accessible, and relatable made me kinda-sorta tingle all the way down to my toes.

Students from Breakwater School and Casco Bay High School also joined us for programs with Aimee Ginsburg Bikel, presented in partnership with the Yiddish Book Center as part of the international centennial celebration of Aimee’s late husband, Theo Bikel.

Theo Bikel feels deeply “Ampersand” to me because he resisted simplification. He was fiercely committed to Jewish language and culture while remaining passionately engaged with the broader world. A Holocaust refugee, actor, musician, activist, and relentless cultural bridge-builder, he embodied the idea that identity is not a fixed box, but an ongoing conversation.

Aimee’s presentations similarly invited her audience into a rich cultural inheritance. Students heard Yiddish music. They explored storytelling, language, activism, and Jewish continuity. They experienced Jewish tradition as something alive — sung, argued over, translated, reinvented, and carried forward by each new generation.

Also, somewhere in New England right now, there are middle and high schoolers unexpectedly walking around humming Yiddish folk tunes, which low-key makes me want to dance the hora.

But perhaps nowhere has l’dor v’dor felt more powerful to me this year than in our ongoing partnership with Bruce M. Whittier Middle School in Poland (Poland, ME, that is!) and their rock star teacher, Jamie Karaffa.

Our collaboration began through Celebrating Rural Maine, a statewide initiative connecting rural schools with cultural organizations and community partners. Over the course of the year, MJM brought programs, stories, and conversations to Whittier; Whittier students came to the Museum multiple times; and relationships developed organically along the way.

Through our Delet program, students took a deep dive into Holocaust history and survivor testimony while also exploring contemporary questions about moral courage and responsibility. Just as importantly, they encountered Jewish life as something larger and more joyful than antisemitism alone. They shared meals, explored Jewish traditions and music, participated in interfaith dialogue, listened to poetry, asked tough questions, and reflected on how the past continues to shape the present.

The Holocaust became one chapter within a much larger and more dynamic Jewish story.

Later this month, that work culminates in Young Voices, Shared Stories: Bruce M. Whittier Students Present Their Holocaust Projects at MJM, a public presentation featuring the students’ final Holocaust projects: creative, research-based explorations inspired by primary sources. The event will bring students, educators, descendants, and community members together to reflect on what it means to transmit these stories with compassion and gravitas. Registration is free but required, and light refreshments will be provided; I encourage you to attend in support of these young people who, at a moment when Holocaust memory feels both increasingly fragile and increasingly essential, are stepping forward with such seriousness of purpose.

L’dor v’dor is not only about preserving traditions unchanged; it is also about what happens when traditions intersect with new people, new places, and new stories.

In this spirit, we are thrilled to welcome Nhi Aronheim to MJM on Thursday, June 25, for a sumptuous Vietnamese–Jewish fusion dinner (catered by yours truly, because apparently I cannot resist an opportunity to relive my decade in the food-service biz) and conversation inspired by her extraordinary memoir, Soles of a Survivor.

Nhi’s story is almost impossible to fathom. At just twelve years old, she fled postwar Vietnam alone, trekking through the jungles of Cambodia with a group of strangers in search of escape. Along the way, she hid from soldiers in sewage-filled water, survived hunger, uncertainty, and refugee camps, and eventually made her way to the United States after years in an orphanage in Thailand. Decades later, after rebuilding her life in America, she returned to Vietnam to reunite with the family she never thought she would see again.

Somehow, this extraordinary journey eventually led her to Judaism.

Today, Nhi speaks powerfully about survival, displacement, grit, chosen family, and the unexpected overlap between Vietnamese and Jewish culture.

We’ll gather in our magnificent Museum garden for an evening of storytelling, conversation, and Vietnamese–Jewish fusion cuisine inspired by Nhi’s journey (and if Maine weather decides not to cooperate, we’ll simply move the festivities into the galleries, surrounded by art, history, and considerably better acoustics).

You can learn more — and grab your tickets before we sell out, which we will — here:

Register for NHI Dinner

And for those who subscribe to the “double the pleasure, double the fun” school of life (coffee on me if you got that reference), Nhi will also be joining us earlier that afternoon for a FREE brown-bag conversation at the Museum: Lunch, Listen, Learn: A Brown-Bag Conversation with Author Nhi Aronheim.

Finally: if you would like to help us keep all of this going — the exhibitions, the educational initiatives, the conversations, the music, the storytelling, the community-building, THE FOOD — I hope you’ll join us on Thursday, August 6 for Comedy, Community & Catskills Classics, our annual fundraiser celebrating the golden age of Jewish comedy and entertainment.

There will be belly laughs, vaudeville, circus routines, nostalgia, and enough Yiddishkeit to make the Borscht Belt proud. All we need is an appreciative audience… which is your cue to register now and avoid FOMO later!

Snag your place in the audience here!

Our online auction will also launch soon, meaning you will shortly have the opportunity to participate in the sacred communal ritual of aggressively bidding against your friends for fabulous prizes while loudly insisting, “No, no, YOU take it,” immediately before placing another bid.

There are probably easier ways to spend one’s career than convincing people that demographic research can have emotional depth, fielding an endless barrage of unfiltered questions from elementary schoolers visiting a synagogue for the first time, cajoling middle schoolers into voluntarily joining a Yiddish singalong, guiding rural Maine students through Holocaust memory, and attempting to fold Vietnamese spring rolls with the misplaced confidence of someone who grew up making kreplach.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure there are better ones.

L’dor v’dor.

Warmly,

 Dawn LaRochelle
 Executive Director