Monday, April 28, 2025
During the nation’s centennial year, 1876, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance, Adas Israel (now in Cleveland Park) dedicated the first purpose-built synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The timing was symbolic, according to Dr. Beatrice Gurwitz, executive director of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum. Having broken off from Washington Hebrew Congregation seven years earlier, Adas Israel was underscoring its American identity, proclaiming (in her words): “We are … celebrating the centennial with all of you.”
Speaking at The Georgetowner’s April 24 Cultural Leadership Breakfast, held at 1310 Kitchen & Bar, Dr. Gurwitz, seven months into her executive directorship, referred to the modest brick structure as “the core of our museum,” “our biggest artifact.”
After the congregation moved to what is now Sixth & I, the former synagogue was occupied by a church, markets, a bicycle shop, a barber shop and a pork barbecue joint (“everyone’s favorite” to cite, she remarked). Physically relocated in 1969, and twice more in recent years, the synagogue-turned-museum is now the centerpiece of an expanded, renamed facility that opened within Capitol Crossing in 2023.
The museum has “two broad trajectories,” she explained. On the first floor, it interprets Jewish Washington, telling the community’s history through artifacts and stories linked to specific individuals. In addition to 19th-century immigration and assimilation, those stories include the post-World War I and New Deal influx of Jewish families, the growth of local institutions and suburbanization.
The second-floor displays focus on Jewish political engagement, not only of residents but of people who came to the District — and continue to come — to serve in the federal government, to advocate and to protest.
A highlight of the latter section for Dr. Gurwitz is a wall of 99 faces and bios of Jewish Washingtonians, well-known and otherwise, with “big soft blocks that you can play with.” Printed with photos and “identity words” such as LIBERAL and CANCER FIGHTER, the blocks are stacked into towers by visitors of all ages to represent facets of their lives.
Understanding how Jewish communities interact with their social and political surroundings is a particular interest of Dr. Gurwitz, who wrote her dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley — and later a book, “Argentine Jews in the Age of Revolt,” — on that community’s political attitudes and behavior from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s.
“I knew nothing, nothing, nothing else about Argentina” — except that Spanish was spoken and there was a significant Jewish population — when, she said, as a 19-year-old student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut she decided to spend six months in the country. Joining a synagogue, she was fascinated to find a diversity of political views, unlike in the U.S., where Jewish Americans “tend to be left, tend to be liberal.” She called President Juan Perón, who died in 1974, “a very complicated figure for the Jews” and noted that Jewish citizens, among others, were targeted during the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983.
Born in D.C.’s Columbia Hospital for Women, Dr. Gurwitz spent most of her youth and early adulthood elsewhere, returning to Washington in 2012 to work in positions of increasing responsibility at the National Humanities Alliance, an advocacy organization for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before joining the Capital Jewish Museum, she served as the NHA’s deputy director.
On the third floor of the new museum building is space for special exhibitions, which have the added benefit of attracting non-Jewish visitors, she noted.
The museum’s first two special exhibitions came from the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles: “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg” and, last year, “I’ll Have What She’s Having” about Jewish delis. Most recently, from November to March, the museum hosted “JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience,” from New York’s Center for Jewish History.
On May 16, just prior to the start of WorldPride in D.C., the museum will open its first major self-curated exhibition, “LGBT Jews in the Federal City.” Some of the Washington-specific topics she mentioned: D.C.’s first LGBT-affirming congregation, the fifth in the nation, founded in 1975 (major local institutions were “not very welcoming”); issues around federal HIV/AIDS research; and 1993’s March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.
The new exhibition will feature photographs, protest posters and oral history listening stations. Along with material donated by the synagogue, now called Bet Mishpachah, artifacts and oral histories were obtained through outreach to the local LGBT community.
Along these lines, a “We Want Your Stuff” program will be launched this summer. Unlike most Jewish organizations in the District, said Dr. Gurwitz, the museum has a mandate that extends “across the whole DMV”; Northern Virginia and Montgomery County are “two frontiers for us.”
Another area of current interest, supported by a grant from the widow of a Department of Education employee: Jews in the federal workforce. “I think it feels extraordinary right now to do this kind of work,” she said.