Visit Space Without Leaving Your House!
From Visitor Services Coordinator Talia Makowsky. To read more posts from Talia, click here.
To book a digital adult group tour, click here.
To purchase tickets to visit JMM, click here.
Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered, “What’s up there?”
Many different people have tried to find meaning in the stars and to understand the movement of the celestial bodies. Whether they’ve made up stories to explain changes in the night sky, or have visited space themselves, curiosity has always drawn people to look up.
We’re celebrating that curiosity, and the exploration and creativity of Jewish people, with our current exhibit Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit. To accompany this exhibit, we have also created a digital tour for groups. From the comfort of your home, a staff member will take you on an inside look, sharing the stories and objects from the exhibit. You’ll learn how Jewish people thought about space in the past, hear the stories of Jewish science fiction writers, and explore spaceflight alongside Jewish astronauts.
This hour-long experience, done over Zoom, is an opportunity to gather with a group of friends or colleagues and together share in the experiences of Jewish space exploration. We offer this tour for up to 25 devices at one time, to provide an opportunity to ask questions and create discussion. We know that talking together is one of the best ways to learn, at least in Jewish culture, and it’s something we’re all missing at the moment. While this tour doesn’t replace the experience of visiting the exhibit in person, we hope that it is a chance to connect and reconnect and have fun together, while looking up at the furthest reaches of our universe.
That said, if you are interested in seeing this exhibit in person, in addition to booking a group tour, visit our website here about procedures and tickets.
As we work on creating new online programs, tours, and experiences, we are also working to improve accessibility. With the shift from onsite to online, we’re able to reach new audiences, across the country and even the globe, who may be entirely new to JMM. We are also able to provide more programming to people who are not able to leave their homes easily to visit the Museum in person, even during pre-COVID times.
Of course, with the new digital platform comes new challenges of accessibility, which we’re learning about each time we give a program. Some things we can include in programs is live closed-captioning, a sign-language interpreter, and detailed instructions for downloading and operating Zoom. During the Jews in Space digital tour, we also describe images as we go along and can slow down the material or repeat information for guests. If there is an accessibility resource that would help you in experiencing our Jews in Space digital tour, or any of our online programs, please reach out to our Visitor Services Coordinator at tmakowsky@jewishmsueummd.org or (443) 873-5164.
Are you ready to blast off into space right now? You can book a group tour by filling out this online form. This will give our Visitor Services Coordinator all the information they need to create a booking. They will reach out to the group leader to review the booking and payment. We also offer our Scrap Yard exhibit as a digital tour if you’re interested in learning about the scrap industry in the US.
To support the Museum and the staff members providing these programs, there is a $50 fee for the digital tour. If this amount is not manageable for your group, please reach out to the Visitor Services Coordinator to arrange an alternative. We want to provide our stories to as many people as possible and are ready to make the program work for your group!
We hope to share our stories with you soon!