It’s home. It’s staying put. And the modest, 1876-era, red-brick building that began its existence as Adas Israel Congregation — which has been moved three times, most recently in 2019 — is the landmark and the most important artifact of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum, which will open to the public on June 9.
A short walk from the Judiciary Square Metro station, the four-story, 32,000-square-foot museum is the newest in a growing number of Jewish institutions around the country looking to preserve and interpret a local Jewish past. The Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum seeks to do the same, at the same time illustrating how the Greater Washington Jewish community differs from New York or Baltimore or Philadelphia.
And the brand-new facility doesn’t lose itself in the old, notwithstanding the historic synagogue, which is integrated into the overall design without losing its distinctiveness. The Capital Jewish Museum is interested in the now, with how past and present meet and, through interaction with visitors, in what the past means today.
“When you see the museum, there’s the original Adas Israel shul, and then there’s the addition, and there’s a bridge that you cross,” says Tina Small, a museum benefactor along with her husband, Albert H. Small Jr.
The bridge, which connects the two structures inside the second floor over the atrium, has a symbolic as well as a practical purpose. “The bridge is to bridge history with the future,” Tina Small says.
Past and Present
Sarah Leavitt, the museum’s curator, is standing in the second-floor exhibit “Connect, Reflect, Act,” where the past and present interact.
Historical displays are arranged by Jewish themes, she says, such as “Tikkun Olam,” or fixing the world; “Kehillah,” how Jewish Washingtonians have created community; and “Israel.”
There is an abortion rights display. “Why is abortion here in a Jewish museum?” Leavitt asks.
The abortion display looks at how four Jewish religious movements responded to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned a woman’s right to an abortion.
That decision, which came last June, is more current event than history. Leavitt says that Dobbs and the Jewish response to it belong in the museum, especially because it’s current.
“It’s exciting when a museum becomes relevant,” she says. “Why talk about the present in a museum? Sure, we might reinterpret [current events] later. That’s what we should be doing. That’s what our visitors will help figure out.”
Nearby, an interactive map table shows the growth of the Washington Jewish community. Ask about the locations of synagogues ― or delis in 1970 ― and they’ll pop up on the map.
There are eye-opening newspaper clippings, such as one from 1926 when the Hebrew All Stars baseball team played the Ku Klux Klan. “Both teams have fine records,” The Washington Post noted.
One display is given over to political buttons: “Nixon is a Nebbish,” “You don’t have to be Jewish to vote against Carter,” “Make Hanukkah Great Again,” “You don’t have to be Jewish to oppose the war in Vietnam.”
Jewish Geography
Nearby, visitors with even a slight familiarity with Washington history and Washington Jewish history will recognize names and faces in the “Who Are You?” display.
There’s Al Jolson’s dad, Moshe Yoelson, the rabbi and cantor of Talmud Torah in Southwest D.C.
And Phineas Idritz, a favorite of the museum curators. Idritz came to Washington from Illinois in 1938. A lawyer who sued to prohibit racially restrictive covenants in property deeds and helped write the pregnancy disabilities act of 1978, he also juggled in public, with clubs shaped like bowling pins.
“We’re not just adding Jews to Washington history,” Leavitt says. “We’re making Washington history Jewish.”
An interactive display of soft “cubes of identity” offers a name, photo, quick biography and one word describing a local Jew. The signage suggests to the visitor: “Stack up the cubes with your words and take a pic.”
The RBG Room
The third floor belongs to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The exhibit, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” follows her life from precocious Brooklyn girl turned brilliant student (once she rebelled and switched her writing hand back to her natural left) to feminist, creative legal mind, Supreme Court justice and, improbably, folk hero.
The small first-floor gift shop offers for sale no fewer than nine books about her, including “RGB Workout.”
The exhibit, as does the museum, employs humor and whimsy without playing down its subject. “Serious and playful,” according to Executive Director Ivy Barsky.
The museum’s backers and leaders are serious when they say that a museum exhibiting the history of the Washington Jewish community (the first Jews came in 1790), housing the archives of a population that has ballooned since World War II, and offering a place for research of events and decisions conducted in the capital of the world’s most powerful nation, is past due.
The museum’s collection includes more than 24,000 digital and print photographs, 1,050 objects and 800 linear feet of archival materials from the 1850s to the present day.
Barsky points out that, with a Jewish population estimated at 300,000 in the District, Maryland and Virginia, “We were one of the largest cities without a Jewish museum.”
Unlike New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, Washington was not a harbor city — Jews who moved here came from other parts of the country, not the Old Country, Barsky says.
And Washington was not an industrial town with steel mills and auto plants that attracted immigrant labor. “The local business is the federal government.”
And so, Washington’s Jewish stories have a “capital twist,” says Eric Yellin, a visiting curator and University of Richmond history professor.
“There’s a shoemaker who serves presidents. A Supreme Court justice who also is a synagogue member. A comic book writer who used to be a CIA agent,” he says.
That phrase “Commit. Reflect. Act.” is both branding and mantra. Leavitt and the other staff say that the contents of the Capital Jewish Museum can inspire a visitor to reflect. If some things are jarring, discordant, so much the better. The discomfort can help turn inspiration into action. That’s the theory the museum will begin testing this week.
“It’s easy to be attracted to the black and white photos. It’s harder to remember that history is now,” says Jonathan Edelman, the museum’s collections curator.
“If all a museum is going to show is pretty things, we haven’t done our job,” Leavitt adds. “We’re giving these stories as a gift to the city and to the tourists that come here. We’ll see what happens.” ■
The Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum
Located at the corner of 3rd & F Streets, NW
575 3rd Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
Phone: 202-789-0900
For more information, visit:
capitaljewishmuseum.org
Admission to the museum and core exhibitions is free. The cost for special exhibitions, including “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” and programs varies.
Museum hours: Wednesday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Monday and Tuesday.
Only In Washington
The changing fortunes of American Jewry are embedded in the date the museum opens, June 9: On that date in 1876, Ulysses Grant was the first president to attend synagogue services, when he helped dedicate the new building of the Adas Israel congregation. Fourteen years earlier, as a Union general, he infamously expelled the Jews of Paducah, Ky., accusing them of being war speculators. President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order, which has been described as “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history.”
Esther Safran Foer, the museum’s president and the former executive director of the city’s historic Sixth & I synagogue, said Grant’s presence in 1876 in the Adas Israel building was emblematic of the upward trajectory of American Jewry. “He sat here for more than three hours in the heat, no air conditioning, and he even made a generous personal contribution,” she said.
―Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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