2018 Report to the Community

President’s Report: Setting

“Anchored in the old immigrant neighborhood of East Baltimore, the museum remains the locus of Baltimore Jewish identity and offers a portal to the world where that identity took root” – Goldstein and Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (2018)

Every great story has a setting—a context in place and time that defines the potential for its future development. 

Looking back over a fantastic year of exhibits, programs and educational initiatives, I was struck by how often the stories we told began at a global or national level – the Holocaust (for Book of Joseph and Beyond Duty), the Iraqi Jewish experience (Discovery and Recovery) or American liberty (Amending America:  The Bill of Rights)but were so often viewed through the lens of one family, one hero, one survivor or one event.  The power of the way JMM tells stories is in the way we transform the “important” into the “personal.”

Don’t get me wrong.  I am delighted by the aggregate measures of our success – a 24% increase in attendance in 2017 over 2016; 63 public programs including several “standing-room only” events; and meeting our targets for fundraising and a balanced budget.  However, I am even more proud of the way we have impacted the lives of individuals, especially the lives of children: the participants in the My Family Story project who turned their family histories into works of art (including our two international competition winners who were sent to Israel); the children of Asylee Women Enterprise who we gifted on Mitzvah Day, children who came from places like Syria and Eritrea; who would “find themselves here” among the Voices of Lombard Street; and the young people of southwest Baltimore who learned through Morrell Park Projected that they too had stories and those stories were worth telling.  This is the meaningful setting for evaluating our work.

This year we re-doubled our efforts at evaluation, not only through on-site visitor and teacher surveys but also in terms of post-visit studies conducted with the help of The Associated.  It comes as no surprise to those of us who are close to the work of the Museum that we are not only get high marks for visitor satisfaction, but we also are producing evidence that visits to JMM inspire action – conversations, web searches, reading – long after the initial contact. 

So I can’t help but be pleased with the results of FY ’18, and I’m even more thrilled at our progress over my three years as president of JMM. I am cognizant of the fact that our success was built on the work of my predecessors and that while our book has at last been published, our story remains unfinished.

Duke Zimmerman

JMM Board President, (2015 – 2017)

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