One More

September 17, 2026 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

I love a round table. There is something wonderfully Camelot-ish about one: no head, no hierarchy, everyone part of the same conversation. Our dining room table in “Harriet the House,” our sweet Portland downsizer, is a custom-designed round Canadian maple beauty that expands into an oval that seats six. I collect table linens and have carefully sourced vintage oval tablecloths that fit it just so. I also collect china, with multiple heirloom sets of – you guessed it –  six place settings. And when Nick and I host a sit-down dinner, we invite four other people.

Six. Six is the number. The table likes six. The tablecloths like six. The china likes six. I like six. We have built an entire dinner-party ecosystem around six.

My boys, alas, couldn’t make it up for Rosh Hashanah this year, so I did the next best thing and invited four friends-like-family (one couple, two singletons) to join us. Four friends + Dawn + Nick the Brit = the perfect six.

A month ahead of time, I had the menu planned, china selected, linens chosen, and tablescape designed. I am, after all, a recovering professional caterer with Martha Stewart aspirations and a deeply held conviction that a dinner party for six should be approached as a full-scale theatrical production. I had thought through colors, serving pieces, flowers, candles, and which food would go into which dish. Did I mention the individual pomegranate-shaped honey bowls at each place setting?

I am told there are people who wait until the day before a dinner party to decide which plates and napkins they’re going to use. I admire their courage.

Then, two days before Rosh Hashanah, one of our singleton guests asked if she could bring a friend.

“Of course!” I said. “There’s always room for one more at the table.”

Then the other singleton asked if he could bring a friend.

“Of course!” I said again. “There’s always room for one more at the table.”

And then I hung up the phone and realized there was absolutely not room for one more at the table. There were now eight of us. Our table seats six.

Nick the Brit, who is extremely useful in a crisis largely because he does not consider a tablescape to be a crisis, came up with a solution. He would unscrew our gorgeous Canadian maple tabletop from its base, put it in the garage (THE GARAGE!), and temporarily replace it with our eight-foot folding workhorse table.

Fine. Horrifying, but fine.

Except all my tablecloths are oval.

Once upon a time, this would have been easy. You would head to Bed Bath & Beyond, stand in front of an entire wall of table linens, and choose among multiple very respectable 120-inch tablecloths. But Bed Bath & Beyond is gone, shopping has migrated online, and apparently a quality, non-disposable tablecloth large enough to cover an eight-foot table has become the sort of specialty item one must order three to five business days before one needs it.

We had 48 hours. And a multi-course holiday menu to cook.

Target had exactly one 120-inch tablecloth. Was it what I would have chosen? It was not. Did it kinda-sorta work with the china? It kinda-sorta did. Reader, I took the win.

There were no matching napkins, but Walmart had some that kinda-sorta worked with the Target tablecloth that kinda-sorta worked with the china. We returned home adequately supplied, and I began setting the table.

Which is when I remembered that my vintage American Atelier Celebrations china, chosen specifically because it has Jewish symbols around the rim, has six place settings.

Of course it does.

Plan B: our guests would use the Celebrations china; Nick and I would use my antique Fenton Silvercrest. Different, yes, but I could make it look intentional. Perhaps even charming. Eclectic! I could work with eclectic.

And then I remembered the soup. The Celebrations set is the only china I own with soup bowls.

Nick suggested, quite reasonably, that we simply buy two white bowls at Target or Walmart. Surely, he said, everyone would understand if they didn’t quite live up to the rest of the hype.

I stared at him, aghast.

“BUT IT’S ROSH HASHANAH, AND IT NEEDS TO BE PERFECT!”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “when have you EVER said it just needs to be serviceable?”

He had a point.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do 48 hours before a holiday dinner: I went on Etsy, found three vintage Franciscan Apple rim soup bowls (two for us and one extra in case of breakage), and persuaded the seller to FedEx them to Maine.

Did they match either china pattern? They did not. Did they have apples on them, thereby making them Rosh Hashanah-adjacent and enabling me to construct an elaborate aesthetic justification for their presence on my table?

They did.

Perfect.

And you know what? The table was perfect. Not because everything matched. It emphatically did not. It was perfect because eight people we love were sitting around it, eating, talking, teasing, telling stories, and celebrating the beginning of a new year together. Turns out, even I can admit that matters more than the soup bowls.

The next day, I entertained my son Peter with the saga during our weekly phone call. He listened to the whole spiel, and then he told me a story.

When Peter ran cross-country at Haverford College, the team ate together at the same table in the dining hall. Sometimes the table would fill, and another runner would arrive. Someone would suggest starting a second table.

“Nope,” someone else would inevitably say. “There’s always room for one more at the cross-country table.”

Peter paused. “And that,” he said, “is your Third Thursday.”

Well, damn. The kid is good.

Because there was room for one more at our Rosh Hashanah table. In fact, there was room for two more. Making that room required a dismantled dining table, Target and Walmart runs, mismatched china, FedExed vintage soup bowls, and a British husband questioning some of his life choices.

But we made room.

And soon, the Maine Jewish Museum will have a table problem of its own.

Beginning in early November, we will close the Museum at 267 Congress Street through April for extensive security hardening construction. Running a front-facing Jewish institution in 2026 comes with a reality I’m not sure everyone outside the Jewish community fully understands: security is now part of the infrastructure of Jewish communal life.

It shapes budgets, events, training, staffing, and how we welcome people into our space. It requires money, time, planning, and mental real estate I dearly wish we could devote entirely to art, history, education, and programs.

Thanks to substantial federal security funding, our historic home will undergo major improvements beginning in November. While that work is underway, the Maine Jewish Museum will close at 267 Congress Street through April. To be clear, Etz Chaim Synagogue will remain open throughout the construction. The Museum is a different proposition: art and construction dust are not exactly natural companions, and programs lose some of their magic when the soundtrack is power tools.

So, for five months, our table is going into the garage. Unlike my Canadian maple dining table, however, we cannot replace 267 Congress Street with an eight-foot folding table from the basement.

So, what do we do? We make the table bigger.

I have said some version of this approximately 5,787 times since becoming Executive Director: a museum is not a building. It is stories, art, education, discovery, and, most of all, people and relationships.

I adore our historic, beautiful, quirky, occasionally maddening building. It is our home. But our address is not our mission.

The Ampersand Project, our statewide effort to capture the variety and complexity of contemporary Jewish life in Maine, showed us just how much bigger our table could be. Israeli photographer Hedva Rokach and publisher Itay Bahur traveled more than 7,000 miles around the state, photographing and interviewing Jewish Mainers for what became our There Is Always an & exhibition and Faces & Facets of Jewish Life in Maine book. In the process, they helped us build relationships in communities the Museum had never reached before.

The most important word in Maine Jewish Museum may be Maine. Our address is in Portland. Our community is statewide.

And we’ve already been practicing. The Portland Jewish History Trail turns the city itself into an exhibition. Delet, our free K–12 education program, brings students to the Museum and increasingly brings the Museum to students. Faces & Facets of Jewish Life in Maine is heading into schools and libraries across the state, while part of There Is Always an & is spending a year at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Augusta.

The Museum has been leaving the building for quite a while. We just didn’t know how much practice we were getting.

So, we will not spend five months waiting to get our building back. We are taking the Maine Jewish Museum on the road. And we aren’t wasting any time.

On November 1, I’ll head to USM’s Wishcamper Center for The Arts Are Not Immune: Antisemitism, Art, and Cultural Life presented with SAGE/OLLI. What happens when Jewish artists, stories, and institutions become proxies for a political conflict? Where is the line between artistic expression, political activism, and antisemitism? And what responsibilities do cultural institutions have when those things collide? We’re going to get into all of it. The program is free and open to everyone, in person or via Zoom.

Then, on December 3, we head west to Bethel, where we’re partnering with the Gem Theater for something completely different: Maine-born “new vaudeville” performer Jay Bragg, with comedy, juggling, physical theater, audience interaction, and classic showmanship. Details are coming soon, but consider this your advance warning that the Maine Jewish Museum intends to have some fun on the road, too.

And here’s where you come in.

Wherever you live in Maine, what would you like the Maine Jewish Museum to bring to your neck of the woods? Maine Jewish history? Art? Music? Food and storytelling? Something for students? Something we haven’t thought of yet? Let us know!

If your table happens to have gallery walls, please call me. Five months is far too long for the Maine Jewish Museum to stop exhibiting artists, and we are actively searching for a temporary exhibition home, or several of them.

Before we go anywhere, though, we have some serious celebrating left to do at 267 Congress Street.

Our final exhibition cycle before the closure is on view through October 29, with work by Sara Crisp, Betsy Cook, and Rosalba Breazeale. And allow me one small Museum-mama brag: the Portland Press Herald just included two of our three current exhibitions, Sara Crisp’s New Work and Rosalba Breazeale’s Poems from Kay Pacha, in its roundup of notable fall exhibitions across Maine. Our little Museum is punching well above its weight class.

And then, TONY AND GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING ACTOR ARI’EL STACHEL IS COMING TO MAINE. I have been trying to contain my excitement about this one. I am failing.

On October 16 and 17, Ari’el takes over the Maine Jewish Museum for an extraordinary weekend centered on a performance derived from his acclaimed autobiographical one-man show, exploring identity, belonging, antisemitism, and the boxes we put ourselves and one another into. And we get Ari’el not once, but three times: Friday morning, Maine high school students will experience the performance through Delet, followed by a conversation and Q&A with Ari’el himself. Friday evening, the theater gives way to the dinner table as Ari’el joins us for a special Yemenite-inspired Shabbat edition of At The Table. Then, on Saturday night, he returns to the stage for a broader community performance.

A Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway actor. High school students. Theater. Shabbat. Yemenite food. Conversation. Jewish identity. An entire weekend devoted to looking past labels and encountering an actual human being in all his complexity. If you know anything about what we are trying to do at the Maine Jewish Museum, you know why I am practically levitating over this.

And the fact that one of our last major weekends before we close literally includes gathering at the table? I am choosing to believe the universe arranged that specifically for this Third Thursday.

When the construction crews arrive in November, we will pack up what we can, hand them the keys, and start looking for other tables. Some will be literal. Some will look like libraries, theaters, classrooms, galleries, colleges, synagogues, churches, historical societies, and community centers. Some will be in places we already know; I hope many will be in communities where the Maine Jewish Museum has never been before.

So, tell us where yours is. Tell us what you would like us to bring to it. Invite us over.

I promise I won’t insist that the china match.

Probably.

Warmly,

Dawn LaRochelle
Executive Director