You are the custodians of moral and spiritual history. You are the custodians of life. Hertzberg needn't have worried. With the vast increase in number and quality of Jewish museums in recent years, these institutions have firmly shouldered the burden of being both a center for cultural study and preservation and an anchor for communal education and outreach. During three days of workshops, lectures and discussion, a lively mix of directors, educators, curators, and academics considered the transformative potential of museums in the American Jewish context, as well as focused on the nuts and bolts of managing Jewish museums.
Jewish museums can play a critical role in enhancing Jewish identity.
Visits to museum exhibitions, and encounters with the artifacts that are tangible evidence of our heritage, provide a sense of connection to other Jews, across time and across space, in a powerful, immediate and completely unique way. A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in downtown Manhattan, the conference was a movable feast of New York Jewish culture, providing opportunities for participants to visit important collections from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum to the Yeshiva University Museum on 185 th Street. The conference also left time for museum professionals to network, exchanging ideas as well as phone numbers and E-mail addresses. Arielle Weininger, program associate at the Spertus Museum, explained during the conference that she was bursting with new ideas to take back to Chicago. As a new member of CAJM and near the beginning of my career, my attendance at the conference was energizing.