Passport

December 21, 2023 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

Anna Goldstein Edis, my mother’s mother, my Grandma, was a teacher. She taught 4^th grade in the same Brooklyn public school district for four decades. She also taught me. She taught me that you know the ruggelach is ready to take out of the oven “when the color is right.” She taught me how play Go Fish and Gin Rummy and punch ball. She taught me bits and pieces of the mameloshen, Yiddish. And she taught me – or, rather, drilled into me – the importance of always keeping my passport up to date.

This was not because she wanted to pass down a love of travel to me. A trip to the Catskills with her sisters for the High Holidays was about as far as Anna Goldstein Edis ever strayed from her Brooklyn brownstone. But Grandma vigilantly kept her passport up to date because, as she maintained, “you never know when you might need to make a quick exit.” Her own parents, who passed away before I was born, fled from the pogroms in Russia. They arrived in the United States with no English and no money and painfully cobbled together a life for themselves and their five children, brick by brick. Anna, a first-generation American and the first in her family to graduate high school, then college, then graduate school, was cautiously optimistic about life as an American Jew by the time she reached adulthood. Still, she was raised on family stories of Jewish persecution and carnage. She had seen democracies crumble and Jews scapegoated time and again. The lessons of history were never fully in the past.

I used to roll my eyes and hide a smirk when Grandma warned me never to get too comfortable in any one place. But I have always been a restless spirit. I chose to attend college in North Carolina to try something different from my hometown in New York. I lived in Japan for two years and Taiwan for six months between college and law school, and I spent an experimental law school summer internship in the Midwest. I moved to New Jersey, then back to New York, then to one part of Western Massachusetts and then to another before settling in Maine last year. I own my dream home, yet I continue to obsessively pore over real estate listings “just for fun,” imagining how I could decorate other living rooms, how I could redesign other kitchens. I fantasize about owning a second home in Italy’s Tuscan Valley, where Nick and I spent an idyllic honeymoon. Or should it be Rwanda, which so captured my heart in the magical two weeks I spent there with friends and family?

For most of my life, I’ve claimed to live by the dictum of adventure seeker Jon Krakauer: “Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic. Make each day a new horizon.” Recently, however, I have begun to question whether my wanderlust instead springs from Grandma’s admonitions despite my eyeball rolls and secret smirks, if Anna Goldstein Edis’ lessons in transiency lie deep in the marrow of my bones, a legacy of intergenerational trauma triggered by antisemitism.

Antisemitism has a long and complex history dating back thousands of years. For those who follow the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5784, and hatred of Jews stretches a long way back, a fly in the amber of lies (think blood libel, which perpetuates the appalling lie that Jews used the blood of Christians, especially children, for religious rituals) and in untrue tropes that a large percentage of people who consider themselves educated believe today, either overtly or subconsciously. Long before the October 7 terrorist massacre in Israel and the devastating war in Gaza, antisemitism was climbing in the United States and worldwide, nearly quintupling in the past 10 years. And everything that was true before October 7 became more so after it. Between October 7 and December 7, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded a total of 2,031 antisemitic incidents, up from 465 incidents in 2022, representing a 337% year-over-year increase.

Our beloved Maine has not been immune to the barrage of hate. Antisemitic flyers have papered Portland from the East End to the West End, some calling the Holocaust “fake news” and proclaiming, “The people that lied about soap and lampshades are lying about gas chambers and ovens.” Vile antisemitic graffiti was found on a wall near the Portland Water District’s sewage treatment plant, at Cony High School in Augusta, and at Bates College in Lewiston. When Temple Beth El held a prayer vigil for Israel on October 11, one individual registered 20 times under the name George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. And just this past week, fake bomb threats were sent to Congregation Bet Ha’Am in South Portland, Beth Israel Congregation in Bath, and Temple Beth El in Augusta. Many of my Jewish friends are afraid to wear their Magen David jewelry and kippahs in public, and talk has turned to whether they should remove the mezuzahs from their doors. And, for the very first time, my peers are unwittingly taking a page out of Grandma’s book and urging their college-age kids to keep their passports up to date.

I am the granddaughter of Anna Goldstein Edis, a 40-year veteran teacher, and attaining my own Masters of Education decades after graduating from law school remains one of my proudest achievements. And while my passport is, indeed, up to date, I know it is not flight, but education that is the best antidote to antisemitism and all forms of hate. That is why I regard MJM’s  Delet Program as the jewel in the crown of our Museum. Delet is the Hebrew word for “door,” and the Delet program is designed to open the door to greater appreciation and understanding with diverse youth by bringing the Museum to Maine middle and high schools and Maine middle and high schools to the Museum. Free to all participating schools, Delet’s culturally responsive curriculum and interactive lesson plans introduce students to Jews and Judaism. Students are provided background-building and context for Holocaust and World Religion and Culture units, among others. They learn what Jews are (and are not), the history of Maine’s Jews, the roots of antisemitism, and how to spot and debunk antisemitic conspiracy myths. We also bring Jewish poetry, literature, art, music, and artifacts to the classroom to enhance interest and engagement. Additionally, we help with the logistics and costs of transporting classes to the Maine Jewish Museum, where students can experience a century-old working synagogue and contemporary Maine Jewish art in the same space.

One of the first schools to which we brought the Delet Program was King Middle School in Portland. MJM Scholar in Residence, Rabbi David Sandmel, and I represented the Maine Jewish community as part of the school’s “What is a Mainer?” carousel. King is one of the most diverse public middle schools in Maine, with 22% of its students foreign born and 31 different languages represented.  At the carousel, many Muslim students were excited to learn that Jews traditionally adhered to similar dietary laws as they did and that both David and I came from immigrant backgrounds. And last Tuesday, I went back to King Middle School to attend its Fall Culminating Event Ceremony, where I was honored as a Community Influencer. Our shared humanity proved stronger than the polarizing hatred all around us.

Delet is a vital part of MJM’s robust schedule of programs, art exhibitions, and historical displays building on the Jewish immigrant experience in Maine to enhance cross-cultural relations with people of all backgrounds. Our Annual Report provides a glimpse into the remarkable work we completed on a bare-bones staff and budget in 2023, and we have even Bigger Plans heading into 2024. Here’s where you come in: as a non-membership Museum, we rely entirely on donations to realize our mission and achieve our (lofty!) goals, and your contribution to our Annual Appeal is more important now than ever.

Every penny counts, and those pennies will go further this year thanks to a generous $25,000 Annual Appeal Matching grant we received from MJM Trustee Bob Hirshon and the Wein-Hirshon Family Trust. The grant, created to offset the lamentably necessary (and unbudgeted) expense of hiring security guards to keep the Museum safe in the current climate, will match all new and increased donations to the Annual Appeal up to $25,000. For example, if you are a new donor and give $250, that will become $500 after the match. If you increase your gift from $100 last year to $200 this year, that $100 increase will become a $200 increase with the matching funds. Please help “the little Museum that could” chug up the mountain with your tax-deductible donation.

I will never stop combing the real estate ads, I am not giving up on that second home in Italy or Rwanda or ??? one day, and my passport will always be up to date. But I’m here in Maine for keeps, and I’m throwing everything I’ve got into my Museum work. Only by preserving our history, mobilizing its lessons (beginning with the young people in whom our future lies), and building allyships can we combat contemporary antisemitism.  And with your continued support, the Maine Jewish Museum will help us move ever closer to the North Star of eradicating hatred in all its ugly manifestations.