Capital Jewish Museum

It's Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the year in Jewish calendar, and I should be fasting. But I'm not.  Fasting doesn't make me look inward. It just makes me cranky. And since there are other things I can do to be a good Jew, I'm going to focus on those instead.

Learning and study are high on the list of mitzvot (obligations) for Jews, making a visit to the Capital Jewish Museum both a nice way to educate oneself about the history of the Jews in Washington, DC and a nice diversion from a book. The museum is built around the original Adas Israel synagogue which was dedicated in 1876 with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.  The congregation decamped in 1908 for the building that is now Sixth and I and later moved to Cleveland Park. Over the subsequent years, the building was home to multiple churches and retail establishments. Thankfully the building was never torn down and was actually moved several times until it reopened earlier this year at 3rd and F Streets NW, with new exhibition space and other facilities wrapped around it.  

The history of Washington's Jewish community follows a path similar to other localities. Its original members were relatively prosperous Sephardic Jews followed by middle class German immigrants post Civil War and those from Eastern Europe arriving later and into the early years of the 20th century. But since Washington was basically a small town until the New Deal and World War II dramatically expanded the size of the federal government and was under direct control of the US Congress until the 1970s, the story of the Jewish community is one of shopkeepers and artisans with few big personalities or stories. 

This changed over time, and the second gallery features 100 accomplished Jewish Washingtonians who have distinguished themselves locally and nationally through careers in arts, science, political advocacy, commerce, and other fields. This and other exhibits touch on important and sometimes sensitive subjects such as race, reproductive freedom, human rights, and environmental justice, with a clear intention to promote reflection and action. There are buttons to push and other interactive features that will keep kids happy while the grownups stay busy with lots of text.

Right now you can also visit The Notorious RBG, an exhibition focused on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's life and work, created by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It's light on DC content (other than that she served on both the DC Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court) but full of interesting objects and successfully turns judicial decisions into visual displays for the non-lawyers among us (me included).

Museum entry is free although there is an additional fee for the RBG exhibit.

Empathy

 

Someone has put up these colorful-but-somewhat-difficult-to-read-while-driving signs on telephone poles around DC and its neighboring jurisdictions, and that basically begged for a post.

My first thought was somewhat ironically not empathetic at all.  I mean, sure, empathy seems like a good thing. It's certainly lacking in the current discourse.  But does whomever went to all the trouble to paint and post these signs (which by the way is illegal) think that this will change behavior?  Is a passerby really going to think, "oh wow yeah.....now that I see that sign, I realize that I should be more empathetic"? 

Apparently, that's what the anonymous poster was thinking per an interview with the local NBC news affiliate. Over the objections of transportation authorities across the region, this individual plans to continue posting signs until "empathy is widely discussed in the region." 

My second thought (well okay maybe it was my third, fourth, or fifth thought) was to question why I was getting all in a lather about this. So okay, maybe I don't buy the theory that these signs by themselves will change behavior.  But the message still makes sense, right?  We should all be more willing to see the world through other people's eyes, taking a moment to consider their point of view rather than just pouncing with all the reasons why we are right and they are wrong.  And if takes a sign on a telephone pole to remind me of that, so be it.

So empathy posting guy, you were right and I was wrong. Your sign made me stop and think, and perhaps has even induced me to be a little more empathetic. Mission (or at least first step of the mission) accomplished.

Remembering 9/11: Twenty Two Years On

The following is a repost from September 11, 2011.  While the events of 9/11/01 are ever more distant, the mess we made in Iraq and Afghanistan ever more apparent and the January 6th insurrection demonstrating that terrorism can be homegrown, my thoughts on the meaning of this day remain pretty much the same.  

I couldn't bring myself to write something in advance about the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks -- in part because I felt that I had nothing to say that hadn't been said a thousand times before and a thousand times better by others and in part because the news late last week of "credible but unconfirmed" information about possible attacks on New York and Washington sent my heart to racing once again.

I didn't know anyone who died in the attack on the Pentagon, at the World Trade Center, or in that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania so I wasn't seared by a personal loss of someone I loved.  But hearing the news and watching it all unfold on TV from my office that day, just four blocks from the White House, was downright scary.  I didn't know where my husband, who spent a good part of most days on Capitol Hill, might be and our babysitter wasn't answering the phone at home, meaning she and my two year old were somewhere out and about.  There were reports of a car bomb in front of the State Department, fires at Bolling Air Force base; all of it seemed both surreal and oddly credible.  I called my mom and asked her to pick up my older daughter at school if I didn't make it home and then I set off on foot, walking the five miles home, too afraid to get on the metro.   My walk took me past the elementary school where kids were being released whenever parents arrived to pick them up.  And when we approached our house, I saw that my husband and younger child had made it home safe and sound.

But nothing felt safe and sound, not for a long time, as we waited for the other shoe to drop.  Every plane that roared by filled me with dread.  Every scare made me panic.  Then there were the anthrax attacks and just as the region was starting to recover, we were again terrorized by a deranged sniper.  And in the face of all this, there was nothing to do but just get on with it.  Go to work, go to school, do the grocery shopping, mow the lawn, and hug your kids, and hold tight to your spouse.

Ten years later, I could write about the mess we've made in Iraq and Afghanistan, the international goodwill we squandered, the xenophobia stirred up by the war on terror, the heroism of first responders, the poise of the victims' families.  But you can read the newspapers, listen to the radio or TV, attend a memorial service to be reminded of all that and more.  For my part, I am trying just to remember that being afraid is wasted energy and that the time to offer up our best selves -- to family, community, nation, and self -- is right now.

Unexpected

I was looking at Google Maps awhile back, figuring out the distances between two places in my neighborhood, when I noticed a pin just across the District line, labeled "Samuel Shoemaker Family Cemetery."  I had walked the streets of this Bethesda neighborhood many times and never noticed anything other than shady streets, a community pool, and houses of various sizes and vintages.

I couldn't help myself.  I had to investigate!

Even though the site was clearly located on the map, it took me awhile to figure out the access point as I certainly did not want to go tromping through anyone's yard. Finally, I found a grassy lane off of Allan Road that took me behind the backyards of the houses fronting on Bayard Boulevard (a street far less fancy than its name). 

There I found a small plot, no bigger than 20' by 20'. Half a dozen tombstones are protected by a wrought iron fence, bearing the names of various members of the Shoemaker family who lived in this area in the mid 19th century.  A little Googling revealed that the Shoemakers were Quakers who emigrated to Montgomery County, Maryland from the Philadelphia area. They farmed in the area now known as Yorktown Village and Westmoreland Hills, leaving little behind when the land was developed starting in the 1930s and kicking into high gear in the 1950s and 60s.  There's a Civil War fortification, Battery Bailey, nearby but otherwise little left of the Shoemakers and their neighbors, save for Shoemaker Farm Lane which cuts between high-rise apartment buildings in Friendship Heights.  And there's no trace of another family cemetery, that of the Isaac Shoemaker family, other than a pin on Google Maps.

In Europe, a graveyard of this vintage would scarcely merit a mention; a small church in a rural English village I visited last summer dated back to the Middle Ages. But here in the new world, it's still pretty cool to find a trace of an even more recent past, especially when it's entirely unexpected.