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JMM Insights
Mitzvah Day 2019
Wednesday, Dec. 25, 2019
at 10:00am

FREE

Jewish American History is American History

from Deputy Director Tracie Guy-Decker
WALL-E
Wednesday, Dec. 25, 2019
at 1:00pm

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Performance Counts

The Value of
Our Visitors' Voices

from School Program Manager Paige Woodhouse
Make a gift today!
Donate online or
call Sue Foard at
443-873-5162
Lives Built on Scrap
Sunday,  January 12, 2020
at 1:00pm

Speaker: Marvin Pinkert
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Ready for Hanukkah?

Call 443-873-5179
for more details.

Remember:
JMM Members get a 10% discount at Esther's Place!
Sunday, January 19, 2020
at 1:00pm

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Throwback Thursday from the Collections!

Pictured: Buyer's Identification Card, Essex House, for Mr. Hammond of Hutzler Bros., issued December 19, 1941. JMM 1995.169.3.
Coming Together
for Justice

Sunday, January 19, 2020
at 3:00pm
Speaker: Amy Nathan
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A Quick Trip
to Philadelphia

from Director of Collections and Exhibits Joanna Church
Music and Memory
Sunday, January 26, 2020
at 3:00pm
Performer: Dr. Alexandra Birch
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JMM Insights:

The Best Behind-the-Scenes
of 2019


In this month's edition of JMM Insights, Deputy Director Tracie Guy-Decker collected some favorite experiences from the JMM staff to celebrate the close of 2019.

~Marvin


It’s mid-December, and many people and organizations are looking back at the year that is ending and putting together lists of highlights from the past year. (Indeed, I wrote just such a post about the JMM programs at this time last year.) This year, however, we’ve decided to do something a little different. Instead of reminiscing with you about the highlights of our exhibits and public programs from the past year, we decided to check in with the staff and ask about favorite moments or activities in 2019 that our members and friends couldn’t see: the best behind-the-scenes moments of 2019. I’ve compiled staff recollections—including my own memories—into a single, chronological top-ten list of behind-the-scenes highlights from 2019:

1. February 2019
As Director of Learning and the Visitor Experience Ilene Dackman-Alon was sending thank you notes to partners and participants in the first-ever Winter Teacher’s Institute, she mused with colleagues that she would likely never again get the chance to visit an embassy in the course of her JMM work. At that exact moment, Ilene’s phone rang. The caller ID read “Embassy of Poland.”

What Ilene did not yet know--but would soon find out--was the Embassy of Poland was planning a trip to Poland of education professionals. In March and April, Ilene joined the 8-day trip, designed to acquire a deeper understanding of the events that took place in Poland during WWII and to learn about the resurgence of Jewish life in Poland. Ilene writes of her trip to Poland, “the experience made me a better educator, and I am better prepared to develop education programs for teachers, helping them tackle subjects of antisemitism, racism, contemporary genocide and the Holocaust.”

(As an aside, this was not the first time a JMM staff member visited Poland in the last several years.)

2. February – March 2019

As a part of our collaboration with Stevenson University for the Year of Fashion convened, in part, by our friends at PNC Bank, students in a corporate design class helped develop a set of icons we used in one of the hands-on interactives in the gallery during Fashion Statement. To get to the end result, we met with the students several times, including a kick-off, emailed feedback, and an in-person critique of their work. It was fun for me (Deputy Director Tracie Guy-Decker) to see these young people take our ideas and run with it. It was even more gratifying when their professor let us know how useful the process had been to her students.

3. March 2019
It’s funny how social media adds to the work of museums. Marketing and Development Manager Rachel Kassman writes about how JMM’s social media schedule allowed her to discover a serendipitous connection between JMM and the Walters Art Museum: “This past winter I received an email from Lynley Herbert at The Walters Art Museum – she was planning to feature a beautiful Haggadah from their collections during Passover and was hoping we might be interested in sharing. Imagine my surprise when I saw a photo of the book – it was a copy of one of the Haggadahs I had just been photographing for JMM’s Passover social media posts. To be fair, hers is a first edition, but they are both lovely and I was thrilled to share about her display on our platforms.

But it doesn’t stop there. We were able to take the summer interns over to the Manuscripts & Rare Books collection at the Walters for a special tour (where they got to see the Haggadah in question, along with a number of other unique and beautiful books), JMM will be hosting a guest blog about the Haggadah during Passover 2020 and Lynley and I are looking forward to future collaborations between JMM and the Walters!”

4. April 2019
I suspect a lot of people believe, as I once did, that to display a garment, one simply needs to put it on a mannequin or dress form and walk away. The truth is considerably more complicated. In order to display something properly, you need to have a mannequin that is the same size as the garment’s original owner. And that mannequin really needs to be wearing the same kinds of undergarments the article of clothing was designed to sit over. For Director of Collections and Exhibits Joanna Church, the work of building the mounts for costume artifacts are among her favorite behind the scenes moments.

About the work for Fashion Statement, she writes: “Not only are there elements of puzzle-solving – matching up the right support garments for the right dress, creating the perfect arms or even a whole form when a commercial dress form won’t work, using creative materials to invent the ideal mount – but there’s something uniquely satisfying when you finally put that dress or suit or hat on its form, step back, and realize it works.  During the preparation process you put a garment on and off its mount as many times as needed, tweaking the supports each time, thinking ‘better… better… almost there… THERE it is.’”

5. June 2019
Every year, we do a volunteer appreciation event in the summer. A big part of the event is the distribution of raffle and door prizes. Those prizes—from tickets to other museums to gift baskets from local grocers—help show our volunteers just how much we love them, but few people realize just how much love goes into acquiring them. In preparation, the volunteer management team, headed by Membership and Volunteer Coordinator Sue Foard, scours the internet for interesting items, filling out requests for donations. Then the real work begins.

Sue calls old friends and new acquaintances to secure gifts, provide official documentation, and physically secure the gifts—often driving to the donor’s location to pick it up. (She says her favorite donor is Esther’s Place, because she doesn’t have to drive to pick up the gifts!) Even once the gifts are all in-hand, the work isn’t done, since they have to be described and displayed in a way that allows the winners to understand (and be happy about!) what they’ve won. Of the volunteer appreciation gifts, Sue asked me to say, “If you know of anyone who might be willing to donate a gift certificate or other item with a value up to $100, please send them my way!”

6. July 2019
In preparation for the Associated’s Centennial in 2020, Archivist Lorie Rombro has been digging deep into our holdings. She’s found and catalogued many items that had been buried in our collections. This work is deeply important and valuable, making our collections more accessible and more useful to our staff, to current and future researchers, and of course, to you—our members and family. But that’s not why this made our top ten list.

The highlight of this work for Lorie was watching a newly-digitized video made from the Associated’s 1941 Campaign film. This gem, unviewed for at least six decades, featured footage of the JEA, Young Men and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, Sinai, Levindale, Mt. Pleasant Sanitorium and Camp Woodlands. When the digitized file first came back to Lorie’s office, several staff crowded into the small space to watch the film on Lorie’s computer. Everyone who saw the glimpse into 1941 Baltimore on Lorie’s screen returned to their own offices with a smile.

7. August 2019
Sometimes changes at JMM originate far afield. Whether at another museum, a conference, or Executive Director Marvin Pinkert’s car ride home, JMMers are constantly looking for new and better ways to do what we do, to create meaning for our visitors, and to keep the institution exciting and relevant. This August, Marvin made the short jaunt to Philadelphia for the annual conference of the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH). There he attended a workshop with the folks from the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

About his experience there, Marvin writes, “This workshop covered how to ask more effective questions about sensitive topics in the context of a museum or historic site.  They gave some great advice on how to deal with challenging memories and contested truths in an increasingly polarized society.  It also inspired me to start JMM down the pathway of becoming a Site of Conscience.”

8. September 2019
In our 2018 annual report (p 6), we told the story of Herr Manfred Brösamle-Lambrecht, a high school teacher in Lichtenfels whose students were creating an exhibit about Jews who once lived in their town. One of the people they researched, Leo Baneman, found his way to Baltimore, and had been featured in JMM’s Lives Lost, Lives Found. Manfred’s students helped to fill in the picture of Mr. Baneman’s story, finding new information and translating it into English for us and for Mr. Baneman’s granddaughter.

In September of this year, I (Tracie) was delighted to welcome Manfred and his wife to the Museum. Former JMMer Deborah Cardin came by to meet them, since she had worked on the Lives Lost, Lives Found project. Manfred brought us a copy of the book that his students created to accompany their exhibit. As Manfred talked about his students’ experiences and we reviewed the beautiful, bilingual book, I was struck by the impact that JMM had with this project. In just this one project, so many lives were touched by the artifacts and stories that we protect. It was a goosebumps moment for me.

9. October 2019

I’ve written before about props in our exhibits. This year, we had call for some interesting additions to the gallery that required Rachel to get her hands dirty. Here’s how Rachel describes it: “There’s just something about getting your hands dirty that really makes you feel like part of the team! In preparation for our Scrap Yard exhibit, I had heard that we were still on the hunt for a few specific materials – including asphalt. When we spotted this chunk on the side of the road between the Museum and our favorite Jonestown bakery (Patisserie Poupon, for the record) how could we not take advantage of the moment and scoop up a sample? Plus, it makes me giggle every time I see my asphalt chunk behind plexiglass in the gallery.”

10. October 2019
If you have attended one of our exhibit openings in the past, you know that our events team, spearheaded by Program Manager Trillion Attwood, goes to great lengths to make sure the décor matches the theme of the exhibit in the gallery. Scrap Yard was no different. For centerpieces, Trillion decided to create flowers from recycled magazine pages. She herself created myriad scrap stems, and she enlisted the help of many of her colleagues. For a couple of weeks, the library tables and the work spaces in the Education offices were littered with delicate flower petals, all carefully snipped out of magazine pages.

At the same time, Trillion had staff and volunteers working on stringing small paper hearts (punched from old book pages!) onto garlands for our lobby skylight. Creating the recycled décor for the Scrap opening and other programs took many hours and much love. They all look amazing, and we hope they may even inspire you to think about creative ways you can reuse materials—keeping them out of landfills and beautifying your life all at the same time!

There were many more amazing moments behind-the-scenes at JMM, but these were our top ten. As we close out this calendar year, I look forward to the many moments of 2020—both in the public eye and out of it—that will make next year JMM’s best year yet!

~Tracie Guy-Decker


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