There Is Always an &

March 19, 2026 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

I was today years old when I learned about the Maine County Song.

Taught in elementary schools across the state, it lists all sixteen counties — from Cumberland and Franklin to Penobscot — set to the tune of Yankee Doodle. Ask almost any adult Mainer, and they can still sing it by heart.

As a transplant “from away,” I find this ineffably charming. Moving, even. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t name as many as five counties in New York, where I was born and raised, or North Carolina, where I went to college, or Massachusetts, where I spent much of my adult life. Or maybe it’s because Maine is the only place I know where local geography comes with a soundtrack.

But knowing the names of all sixteen counties is one thing. Feeling connected across them is another.

And that space between knowing and belonging is one I have been thinking about a lot lately.

As we approach Pesach, a holiday centered on asking questions, I am drawn to spaces that invite curiosity rather than easy answers. At the Seder table, we return to the same story each year — not to arrive at a single conclusion, but to deepen our understanding through inquiry.

This is the spirit behind There Is Always a &, our current photography exhibition by award-winning Israeli artist  Hedva Rokach. It is an invitation not to define Jewish life in Maine, but to encounter it in all its complexity.

In a scant six weeks last spring, Hedva traveled 7,000 miles across the Pine Tree State, photographing over 300 Jewish Mainers (more than one percent of Maine’s Jewish population). She didn’t just pass through the state. She moved across all sixteen counties, meeting people, building trust, and following one introduction to the next.

And in doing so, she didn’t just document a community. She connected one.

This was a community effort from the outset, rooted here in Maine and sustained by the relationships that made the project possible. A Board member loaned his car for Hedva’s 7,000-mile journey. Museum friends opened their Old Orchard Beach condo as a home base. Each person photographed led to more introductions, more trust, and more bridges across counties and communities. Hedva’s partner, Itay Bahur, traveled those 7,000 miles alongside her and helped bring the project into the world. My husband, Nick — a.k.a. “the Brit,” and one of our hardest-working unpaid staff members — took a full week off to help with framing and mock-ups.

This did not happen because one person had a good idea. It happened because people showed up, across distances and across differences, and kept saying yes.

The exhibition reflects that shared effort. It is deliberately designed to feel familiar, like a family photo gallery elevated to museum scale — faces and stories held side by side, not to define Jewish life in Maine, but to expand it.

Yes, you will encounter the kinds of diversity we often name first: interfaith families, LGBTQ+ individuals, Jews of color. But you will also meet third-generation potato farmers, homesteaders, birch syrup producers, artists, puppeteers, and people representing a wide range of political perspectives, including deeply held and sometimes conflicting views on Israel.

The exhibition resists easy categorization.

That is the point.

The “&” becomes a quiet but powerful act of resistance, rejecting either/or thinking in favor of both/and, and making space for contradiction, complexity, and fullness.

Even as it was unfolding, the project was already growing beyond itself. What emerged was not a single body of work, but something larger, taking shape in multiple forms, each one extending those connections further.

One of those forms is the book Faces & Facets of Jewish Life in Maine, which will be distributed free of charge to high schools across the state in the 2026-2027 school year. Thanks to a Major Grant from the Maine Humanities Council, it will be accompanied by curriculum materials designed to ensure it is not simply placed on a classroom shelf, but actively engaged, discussed, and taught. It is also available for public purchase through the Museum, with 100% of the proceeds going directly to the artist.

In parallel with this work, a growing oral history library is taking shape. Toby Adelman, a longtime Museum friend from Aroostook County, was so moved by the “&” concept that she donated her documentary skills to begin filming interviews with exhibition photo subjects. These interviews, accompanied by Brett Wiese Saunders’ evocative videography, feature people telling their own stories in their own voices, adding depth and dimension to a narrative still unfolding.

The project is also shaping the underpinnings of our core exhibition redesign, which will flip the script on traditional Jewish museum exhibitions by focusing not primarily on where we have been, but on who we are right now, and on every visitor as an agent in history-making.

Grounded in our past, yes, but not confined by it.

Because Jewish life is not only something to remember. It is something to live.

And it is something to live everywhere in Maine, in ways as varied and complex as the people who call it home.

That is the shift the exhibition is making.

We are the Maine Jewish Museum — not the Portland Jewish Museum. For too long, many Jews outside Greater Portland have felt peripheral to the story, unseen within a narrative that did not fully reflect them. There Is Always an & widens that lens, bringing those stories into view and connecting them to one another.

Taken together, all this points to something simple:

There is always an & — not as a slogan, but as a way of seeing.

It is the space between knowing and belonging, and the recognition that belonging is not something we inherit or memorize, but something we build.

And here in Maine’s Jewish community, that work is already underway, across all sixteen counties.

We are holding Hedva, Itay, and our friends and family in Israel and Iran in our hearts, praying for their safety and well-being, and hoping for a future shaped by lasting peace.

Warmly (still a transplant, still learning the song),

Dawn

Dawn LaRochelle
Executive Director

P.S. If you want to feel the “&” — not just read about it — join us next Thursday, March 26 at 7:00 PM for The Afro-Semitic Experience live in concert at MJM!

It’s high-energy, joyful, and rooted in the idea of “unity in the community.” Students from Freeport Middle School will workshop with the musicians during the day and return that evening to perform alongside them, which is exactly the kind of connection this work is all about.

Thanks to generous support from The Leir Foundation and Congregation Bet Ha’am, tickets are just $18, and we’d love to see a full house. Consider this your gentle nudge to click below:

Get tickets to The Afro-Semitic Experience