JMM Insights: Happy Passover

Welcome to JMM Insights, your weekly update on what’s happening at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. 

Happy Passover, Holy Week, and Ramadan to everyone celebrating! The JMM will be closed from today through the entirety of Passover. We will re-open on Sunday, April 24.

Even though we are closed, look below for some great Passover content, including selections from our collections plus activities and videos for kids about the holiday.

First up, here is a blog featuring:

  • The story of the 1971 Passover Youth Mobilization for Soviet Jewry, when Baltimore teens created Passover packages to send to various embassies in DC, along with a call to support Soviet Jews. 
  • A beautiful collection of Passover plates commissioned by Solomon Bardiger, a Ukrainian Jew who moved to the UK in 1890, where he ran a china shop. 
  • A stunning handmade matzah cover made by Bessie Levitt Jacobs, likely when she was a teenager in Lithuania around the turn of the 20th century. 

Art Sparks, our weekly art and activities email blast for people aged 5-11, features some exciting Passover content, including a print out Find The Afikomen maze. Check it out here and sign up for Art Sparks here.

Here are tips on how to have a greener Passover by making holiday crafts from recycled materials, like a tambourine in honor of Miriam’s song when she crossed the Red Sea in the Passover story, and an Eco Elijah’s Cup.

Do you have kids in your life who want to see some Passover videos? Here’s a fantastic collection of them, plus some Passover children’s books recommendations. 

We wish everyone happy holidays and a joyful spring! 

Creative Quest: Art From the Holocaust’s Second Generation is on display through April 28 at Howard Community College Horowitz Center for Visual & Performing Arts. Check out this JMORE article about the exhibit, Howard Community College Exhibition Features Art by Children of Holocaust Survivors. 

Check out Laura Elkeslassy’s new album, “Ya Ghorbati”

“In multimedia album Ya Ghorbati, singer Laura Elkeslassy musically excavates her family’s history in Morocco, France, and Israel, coming face-to-face with forgotten ancestors and reclaiming a lost family name. Developed in collaboration with music director Ira Khonen Temple, this project weaves together the stories of Judeo-Arab divas from the last century with folk and sacred music. Ya Ghorbati looks across time and space to tell a tale of political upheaval, exile, and displacement—ultimately questioning the supposed binary of Arab and Jew.”

Black Ox Orkestar, a Jewish band from Montreal, released their first recording in more than a decade through Jewish Currents. The band was formed in 2000 to “explore the sounds of the Jewish past, drawing on their experiences as North American Jews whose lineages range from Eastern Europe to North Africa. The result is a vivid, almost overwhelming sound that transports the listener not into the past, but to an alternate present, one where the wails and thrums of Jewish music around the world—­especially the Ashkenazi genre known as klezmer—were never stifled.”

The song is called “Mizrakh mi ma’arav” (“East from West”) and its lyrics are based on Psalm 107. Check it out! 

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