Class Pictures

Blog post by JMM archivist Lorie Rombro. You can read more posts by Lorie HERE.

I don’t know about you, but my house is boring me a bit. Seeing the same thing all day, every day was getting to me. I needed something new to look at.

So, I decided to change things up a bit – starting with the photographs I already had in frames and adding even more images around the house. This year my children’s school pictures were great, they looked good, they were clean and their clothes matched. This rarely happens! Normally I get back an image that looks more like a mug shot then the nice school pictures you always see.

As I looked at them I started to think of my own school and family pictures, like, how many people do I still recognize? Where are those pictures now?

*Samson and Walter Feldman, 1915 class photo. JMM 1989.156.7b.*

And then I started thinking about all the wonderful images in JMM’s Collections. At the Museum we have been incredibly lucky to have had people donate many of their own school photographs over the years.

Most of the time, the people in them are not famous, they’re just people who lived their lives as part of the Jewish communties of Baltimore and Maryland. But it’s these images that truly give us a glimpse into life here over the years. They are a joy to look at and wonder about the lives of the people pictured in them..

I wanted to share with you some of these school photos -like so many of our photographs, we don’t have names for many of the people pictured. Maybe you can help! If you recgonize anyone please let me know (lrombro@jewishmuseummd.org).

Please enjoy!