Documenting Maine Jewry - DMJ Current Projects

Documenting Maine Jewry : Current Projects
Volunteers are welcome to join any of these programs


Mystery Photographs		send new info to dmj @ mindspring.com
Documenting Maine Jewry now has over 1300 photographs involving Maine Jews on the website. A good number of these images have ‘mystery’ people, people that the donor of the photograph just could not identify by name. These photographs, grouped by city and town, are available here. Please look them over and if you recognize someone insert their name in the comment box on the upper right of the page with the picture.
Documenting all of Maine’s rabbis and cantors		project coordinator : Ed Schultz (Portland)
Ed Schultz (Portland) is endeavoring to compile a list of all the rabbis and cantors who have served in Maine’s Jewish congregations. This listing will include both professional trained rabbis and cantors and lay members who served in these functions. The current list is available here . If you have additional knowledge, please send it to Ed via dmj @ mindspring.com
Maine Jewish Camps Project		DMJ consultant : Nancy Silverman Levinsky(Portland)
The Maine Jewish Museum has asked Documenting Maine Jewry to curate an exhibit on Maine Jewish Summer Camps. This exhibit should be on display before the start of this year's camp session Nancy Silverman Levinsky is leading the effort to prepare exhibition panels, a rotating photo exhibition, and a display of camp memorabilia. If you have personal reflections, old camp newsletters or photographs, or some camp stuff that might be appropriate to exhibit, please contact Nancy c/o dmj @ mindspring.com . Nancy herself was a camper and counselor at Camp Naomi, Raymond, Maine 1976-1982
Listening Stations at Maine Jewish Museum		project coordinator : Harris Gleckman (Westchester)/ Miles de Klerk (Colby)
The Maine Jewish Musuem has an seating in the former women's gallery that overlooks the main sanctuary. Documenting Maine Jewry is working with the Maine Jewish Museum to create listening stations with iPads that can be used by visitors to the museum. Each listening station will provide access to cantorial davening by Maine cantors and to extracts of the oral histories of Portland area Jews. Miles is reviewing the collection of oral histories and creating a thematic index that can be used to prepare short story extracts for the listening stations. It is expected that these listening stations will be operational in June 2012. Anyone who has recordings of Maine cantors is encouraged to contact Harris at dmj @ mindspring.com
Documenting Bangor synagogues	<	Marcia Lieberman (Bangor)
The Jewish Community Endownment has provided a grant to DMJ to help digitize the records of Bangor's three synagogues. Over the spring and summer months, DMJ with a local historian will be scanning key records, creating an index to these records, and uploading them on the DMJ website .
Forest Park, Portland	<	Shirley Rosen (Portland)
Forest Park, now known as Princeton Properties, is located on Baxter Blvd in Portland. and by now you should have the map as it was then and as it is now. Different owners and tenants, but it's still Forest Park to me. Goladetz and Saul Chasson built the Garden Apartments after WWII to accommodate the returning veterans and others. In the late 1940s and 1950s, there was a sizeable number of Jewish families living in Forest Park. Later these families moved from the apartments in Forest Park to their own homes in more suburban parts of Portland and elsewhere. This project is attempting to collect the names of the families who were part of this transition. The current listing is available here. If you know of other families, please send Shirley a note at dmj @ mindspring.com
new Belfast Jewry homepage		local gabbii for Belfast : Marsha Mendelson Carlin
Marsha Mendelson Carlin has recently offered to coordinate information on the history of Belfast community . If you have documents, family histories, photographs on either of these communities, please forward them to Eber via dmj@mindspring.com . Hopefully the new homepages should be up and operating by March 2012.
new Old Orchard Beach home page	local gabbi for OOB : Eber Weinstein (Old Orchard Beach)
Eber Weinstein has for some time wanted to have a separate home page on Old Orchard Beach. If you have documents, family histories, photographs on either of these communities, please forward them to Eber via dmj@mindspring.com . Hopefully the new homepages should be up and operating by March 2012.
time-line of significant events in Maine’s Jewish history	<	Andrea Birnbaum (Colby College) c/o dmj @ Mindspring.com
Andrea Birnbaum (Colby College) is developing a time-line of significant events in Maine’s Jewish history and the Jewish history of individual towns. This information should both help to contextualize the personal and organizational biographies and to provide a format that can display all the relevant information by a given year.
Maine Jewish census data on Google maps		Cassie Jensen (Lewiston)
Cassie Jensen (Lewiston) is working out how to display the Maine Jewish census data on Google maps . From a number of sources, DMJ holds extracts of likely Jewish residents that appears in the Federal Census from 1880 to 1930. Visually displaying the census data on colorful Google maps should provide a better appreciation of where Jews lived in each town at the start of each decade.
Traveling Exhibition		Steve Hirshon (Portland) and Ruthanne Singal (Falmouth)
Documenting Maine Jewry has received a grant from the Viner Hirshon Family Foundation to curate an exhibit with two towns in maine in 2012.