Time, Folded

October 15, 2026 | Third Thursday Thoughts
Dawn LaRochelle, Executive Director

Time has a way of folding in on itself, accordion-like. Years and decades, past and present, layered over each other like butter into delicate sheets of croissant dough, until a single moment holds an entire lifetime.

A few weeks ago, an email landed in my inbox.

“Hi, Dawn. It’s been a while. Hope you and your boys are doing well!”

“It’s been a while” – well, that’s one way of describing more than two decades!

The email was from Miriam B., my work wife when we were both associate attorneys at Milbank, Tweed in the Big Apple several lifetimes ago. It was a world in which every waking hour was potentially billable, every nonbillable hour was suspect, and Stockholm syndrome passed for professional fulfillment. (Shared trauma bonds you for life.)

The last time we saw each other, we’d both traded legal briefs for diaper bags, and I was beginning to entertain the entirely sensible notion that a mother of three boys under the age of five should launch a kosher catering company. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

We had every intention of staying in touch. But Miriam was in New Jersey, I was in Western Massachusetts, social media was not yet a thing, and life, as it tends to do, got in the way. Miriam eventually returned to the law, taking over her father’s trusts-and-estates practice, while I spent the next couple of decades collecting careers the way some people collect shoes (okay, the way I collect shoes!). And somehow, twenty-plus years slipped by.

Fast forward to the present. Miriam had stumbled across the Maine Jewish Museum while searching for a home for the artwork of her 94-year-old client, a retired Jewish professor who had spent his summers in Maine. She recognized my name, reached out, and suggested we meet for coffee when she passed through Portland.

Small world, indeed.

Coffee turned into dinner, and then another dinner, this time with our spouses and my 23-year-old son Peter, who is spending a few weeks with us before moving to Philadelphia. And here’s the kicker: Miriam and her husband, Todd, are building a house in New Hampshire, just an hour from Portland. After more than twenty years apart, we’re about to become practically neighbors.

As we sat around the dinner table, catching up on the intervening decades and contemplating the prospect of many more dinners to come, past and present seemed to occupy the same space.

There I was, sharing Mediterranean mezze with Miriam and Todd, Nick the Brit, and a thoroughly grown-up Peter. Except that I was also back in New York, a baby lawyer at Milbank, Tweed, still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I was a stay-at-home mom in Western Massachusetts, chasing a rambunctious two-year-old Peter around the house, assuring myself, with considerably more optimism than evidence, that someday all that energy would be channeled into something productive. And I was an aspiring caterer, wondering whether anyone would actually pay me to cook for them. And I was the woman I am today, running a museum, with a catering business firmly in my rearview mirror and a Shabbat dinner for 50 on my to-do list. Whiplash, much?!

The story gets even better.

MJM isn’t a collecting museum, and we rarely accept donations of artwork. But as Miriam and I talked, it emerged that her client had other treasures in need of a home: a pair of brass candlesticks his grandmother brought from England when she emigrated to America, and a wooden dreidel he received as a child in Hebrew school nearly a century ago. These were precisely the kinds of objects we hope to incorporate into our future historic exhibitions: modest family possessions that offer unique glimpses into Jewish life across generations. Without someone to recognize their significance, they might have ended up at a tag sale, sold for pennies, or simply thrown away.

Instead, they’re now safely tucked away at MJM, waiting for their moment in the spotlight.

Think about that. A friendship forged in a Manhattan law firm back when the dinosaurs roamed leads to an unexpected reunion in Portland, Maine, which leads to a pair of immigrant candlesticks and a childhood dreidel finding a new home in a museum devoted to preserving Jewish stories.

It occurs to me that perhaps this is what museums do best.

We gather the fragments of lives lived across generations and bring them into conversation with the present. A pair of candlesticks becomes a window into an immigrant family’s journey. A wooden dreidel takes us back nearly a century, to a little boy in Hebrew school who could scarcely have imagined that, at 94, he’d be entrusting his childhood toy to a Jewish museum in Maine. (For that matter, he probably couldn’t have imagined there would be a Jewish museum in Maine!)

This, in many ways, is the animating idea behind our planned Core Exhibition redesign, an ambitious, multiyear undertaking exploring the creativity that surfaces when people, place, history, and identity intersect. There’s considerable planning and fundraising ahead, but the vision is taking shape: a museum experience that brings Maine’s Jewish past into conversation with its present and invites visitors to discover where their own stories fit. Stay tuned!

And speaking of the wonderfully complicated business of identity, this weekend promises to be a doozy!

Tomorrow morning, Tony Award-winning actor Ari’el Stachel will perform his autobiographical show, OTHER, for Maine high school students as part of our Delet educational initiative. Among them will be students from Casco Bay and Lewiston, home to two of Maine’s most diverse high school communities. Ari’el is an Arab Jew of Yemenite heritage, and his very presence challenges one of the most persistent misconceptions about Jewish identity: that Jews are all white, European, and interchangeable. His performance explores the convoluted, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious business of navigating identities that refuse to fit neatly into anyone else’s boxes. In many ways, it’s MJM’s Ampersand Project in theatrical form. For students growing up in a world increasingly divided into competing camps and convenient labels, I can think of few more powerful lessons than meeting someone who defies categories altogether.

We love double-headers at MJM, and tomorrow evening, we’ll gather for a sold-out, Yemenite-inspired Shabbat dinner with Ari’el, catered by yours truly. Then, on Saturday evening, Ari’el will once again take the stage for An Evening with Ari’el Stachel, followed by a decadent dessert buffet, also prepared by moi. (My retirement from the catering business is going swimmingly.) A few tickets remain for Saturday’s performance, and I cannot encourage you strongly enough to join us.

The Portland Press Herald recently featured Ari’el and his upcoming visit to MJM, and I hope you’ll take a moment to read the article. This is a pretty remarkable couple of days for The Little Museum That Could!

Ari’el’s visit will also be something of a last hurrah before the Museum closes its galleries and on-site programming spaces from November to May for extensive, federally funded security improvements. I’m grateful that we can make our beautiful, historic building more secure, though I wish we lived in a world where such measures weren’t necessary. And while I’m excited about everything we have planned for the months ahead, I’ll miss the bustle of visitors, exhibitions, and events filling our halls.

Before the artwork comes down, however, you have a few more opportunities to visit. On October 22, join us for Coffee with the Artist: Besty Cook and explore Betsy’s exhibition, rooted in Jewish mystical traditions. Our exhibitions close October 29, the same evening we’ll host our final on-site program before construction: a very special edition of our Happy Hour with a Historian series, featuring the extraordinary World War II POW diaries of a Jewish American airman. Filled with vivid drawings and firsthand observations of life in captivity, these diaries are a breathtaking combination of art, history, and human resilience.

While the Museum’s walls will temporarily be bare, our work will be anything but. On November 2, I’ll be at USM’s Wishcamper Center for The Arts Are Not Immune: Antisemitism, Art, and Cultural Life, a free public program presented in partnership with Portland Ovations and USM’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The following month, we’re heading to Western Maine for Chanukah in New Vaudeville!, a collaboration with Bethel’s Gem Theater. After all, we’re the Maine Jewish Museum, and there’s a whole lot of Maine beyond Portland.

One more thing before I go: nominations for the Maine Jewish Hall of Fame are another terrific way to help us preserve and celebrate the stories of Jewish Mainers whose contributions have made our state, and our world, a better place. Think about the exceptional people in your own lives whose stories deserve to be told, and share your nominations with Honorary MJM Board Member Steve Brinn ().

And with that, I’ll return to where I began, with time folding in on itself and making a delightful mess of our tidy notions of past and present. Because what struck me most about reconnecting with Miriam wasn’t simply how much had changed in twenty-plus years. It was how much of those years was somehow right there with us.

Time doesn’t always march forward. Sometimes it doubles back, pulls up a chair, and joins you for dinner.

Warmly,

Dawn LaRochelle
Executive Director