Jewish Museum

Food, puppets and a tour of the nation's third-oldest synagogue - that's how the Lubin family celebrated their Jewish heritage yesterday. The family from Reisterstown had a picnic lunch of gefilte fish and matzo at the Inner Harbor, attended a Passover puppet show at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, saw an exhibit on Jewish camping there and then went on a tour of Lloyd Street Synagogue. "It's a family day," said Brian Lubin, with his wife, Melanie, and son, Russell. "He's keeping Passover pretty good for a 4-year-old.

The best consumer advice for those attending the current exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland is: Plan on going out to eat immediately after the show. "Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity" is brimming with delicious information about brisket, challah, bagels, matzoh balls, potato latkes, gefilte fish and more guaranteed to spark an appetite. Through text panels, photographs and actual kitchen objects, the exhibit is a multi-course exploration of how Jewish identity is established at the dinner table as much as in a synagogue service.

Rabbi Abraham Rice arrived in East Baltimore 170 years ago from Europe, and over the weekend dozens of his descendants came here, too, to meet distant relatives and learn more about the first ordained rabbi to lead a congregation in the United States. The Rice family reunion gathered Sunday at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, which coincidentally is celebrating its 50th anniversary and the recent renovation of the Lloyd Street Synagogue, where Rabbi Rice served so long ago. Jewish immigrants began arriving in America in the 1650s, and by 1840 about 10,000 Jews lived in the country, said Deborah Weiner, research historian at the museum.

If the Jewish Museum of Maryland had less faith in the city, it might have bailed out long ago.Surrounded by public housing, vacant lots and rundownwarehouses, its property near Lloyd and Lombard streets in East Baltimore hardly seems the ideal spot to build a $2.3 million expansion.But if museum directors had left the area for more tourist-friendly environs, they never could have created the gem that opens today.The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Building is the most noble of architectural works -- a structure that not only grows out of its surroundings but strengthens them.

Responding to a female rabbi's invitation, 55 women from their 30s to their 70s showed up at the Jewish Museum of Maryland yesterday to write stories of their lives for the museum's archives. The rabbi, Nina Beth Cardin, said yesterday's event was the first such writing exercise at the museum, and was designed to preserve pieces of women's lives and minds at the turn of this century -- pieces that might otherwise pass unnoticed. "This will give us a view of Baltimore as it hasn't been recorded before," Cardin told the group.

NEW YORK -- In one gallery a computer-based work includes a photograph of inmates at a Nazi concentration camp into which an artist has inserted a picture of himself holding a Diet Coke. Nearby, a piece called Giftgas Giftset features colorful canisters of make-believe poison gas labeled "Chanel," "Hermes" and "Tiffany." In another room are clay busts of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who conducted gruesome experiments on inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp. For months, the art world has debated the worth of these works, whether they are art, hurtful provocations or tasteless trivia.

BERLIN -- The building is empty, and still they come, 10,000 people a month, embarking on a silent pilgrimage into a nation's soul.They tread through disorienting corridors that weave this way and that. One stairwell is topped with light and seeming life. Another path leads to symbolic exile, a jagged garden of concrete pillars shrouded with oak willows. And over there, the heavy door is moved, and the Holocaust Tower is entered, with its deathly chill and darkness countered by a shaft of sunlight.

When the staff and contributors at the Jewish Museum of Maryland were putting together the new exhibit "Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture, and American Jewish Identity," they knew better than to try and tell people what is Jewish food and what is not. If a matzo ball is pretty clearly Jewish food, does a low-fat version with chives still count? Is falafel Jewish? Is hummus? Can sushi be Jewish if it's served at Jewish weddings? Where does lo mein fit in? According to curator Karen Falk, questions like those, and the way they are linked to larger conversations about religious, ethical and cultural values, are at the heart of the exhibit, which opens Oct. 23 and runs through September 2012.

Avi Decter has been doing some thinking about Jewish mothers lately, and that has led him to an arresting conclusion. "You don't have to be Jewish to be a Jewish mother," the voluble director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, observed recently. "You don't have to be a mother to be a Jewish mother. You don't even have to be a woman to be a Jewish mother." An amusing and insightful notion, to be sure, but one that wouldn't have come to much had it occurred to most of us. A witticism at the dinner table perhaps, or maybe an e-mail to a friend.

In the shadow of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia, John Wilkes Booth will tell anyone who'll listen just why that tyrant had to be assassinated. Supporting himself on a wooden crutch, a decidedly agitated Booth, his voice rising to match the fierceness in his eyes, rants about the war and how it ended. "My genteel South, gone," he says, seemingly on the verge of a sob. He goes on to relate the events of that night at Ford's Theatre, the leap from the presidential box and the escape through Maryland that eventually led him to a barn in Virginia, surrounded by Union troops.