BY STEPHANIE KASHETA
While Europe may lay claim to the vast majority of the world’s Jewish heritage sites, the United States has several places of historical import to offer visitors. Here are five American sites to visit during Jewish American Heritage Month, which goes throughout the month of May.
1. The Jewish Museum in Miami Beach, Florida is located in a renovated synagogue and boasts artifacts of Floridian Jewish life dating to the 1700s in addition to a collection of Holocaust photos, documents and religious objects.
2. New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage touts itself as a living memorial to the Holocaust. It has three floors which each deal with a different aspect of Jewish history: “Jewish Life A Century Ago,” “The War Against the Jews” and “Jewish Renewal.” An online database also houses most of the museum’s artifacts. The museum’s 375-seat theater hosts many lectures, movies, plays and concerts centered around Jewish Heritage.
3. The Albert Einstein House in Princeton, New Jersey was built in the 1870s. Though Einstein specifically stated that he did not wish for this house to be turned into a museum, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This house was Einstein’s last workplace while he taught at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced studies. He lived here with his wife Elsa, his stepdaughter Margot and his secretary Helen Dukas.
4. The United States Holocaust Museum features a narrative history of the Holocaust in addition to boasting many traveling exhibitions to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to a worldwide audience. It is located among the country’s many national monuments to freedom along the National Mall. It has also started many leadership training programs and its website is the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust.
5. Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum is a four-story structure dating to the early 1800s and became the orphanage in the late 1870s. After a fire in 1874, the orphanage was rebuilt. The children it housed were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence in every endeavor. In the 1920s the orphanage moved to Levindale, which closed within a few years of its inception. In 1923 the building was converted into the West Baltimore General Hospital and its last incarnation was the Lutheran Hospital of Maryland, converted around 1945 and demolished in 2009, though the original red-brick structure still stands.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Boston. She is a Las Vegas native who recently relocated to Cape Cod with her husband, a veteran of the US Air Force. Stephanie is also step-mother to a seven-year old future writer named Olivia. When not reading or daydreaming of travel abroad, she can be found blowing glass at the Sandwich Glass Museum or working on her short story collection. Follow her on Twitter
Feature image US Holocaust Museum via Shutterstock