When Sol Davis arrived in Baltimore in January to take over as the new executive director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM), some could say it may not have been the ideal time to start a new job. COVID-19 was raging and the JMM was closed to visitors, with many wondering when it would fully open again.
Yet that didn’t deter him. Sol had a vision. A vision that combined the past successes of the JMM and the learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic with a concept of how museums might evolve in the future.
We sat down with this dynamic new director to get to know him better and learn about how he sees the JMM moving forward.
You previously served as the executive director of the Jewish History Musuem and Holocaust History Center in Tucson, AZ. What are you most proud of? In Tucson, I led a project to create the first and only Holocaust museum in the state of Arizona. The idea for this began in the 1960s, when survivors began to articulate their dreams for the museum. We finally opened in 2016. In addition, we made the Jewish museum the epicenter for young Jewish cultural life. We held private concerts in the historic synagogue on the campus, and they were packed. Young adults created many of their own programs like happy hours and quarterly Shabbatons that were wildly successful.
Why then the JMM and Baltimore? In the Jewish museum world, the JMM is one of the strongest mid-sized museums in the country. It has a great reputation, and I am excited to be part of its success… to help craft a post-pandemic vision. In addition, there are many similarities between the JMM and the Jewish History Museum. Both sit adjacent to the downtown area where there is not a lot of Jewish infrastructure. In Tucson, we saw this as an opportunity to engage Jewish young adults, to be collaborative in designing the programs they wanted. I believe there is tremendous potential to do the same here.
