Each May, Jewish American Heritage Month invites Jews to pause and tell stories from our shared history. But history, at its best, is not only about what came before us. It is a guide for how we show up today and how we imagine the future we are building together.
Jewish life in Boston is deeply woven into the civic fabric of this city. From organizing and civil rights advocacy to philanthropy, medicine, education, and culture, we have always believed that we are responsible not only for our own community but for the common good.
This month, Embrace Boston has been highlighting figures like Kivie Kaplan, the Boston businessman and former president of the NAACP whose fierce advocacy for civil rights earned him a place in Freedom Plaza. Kaplan’s story reminds us that Jewish history cannot be told apart from the democratic life of this city and country, from the institutions, movements, and civic spaces that Americans have shaped together. It also reminds us that pluralism and allyship is not abstract—it is practiced through partnership, shared risk, and moral courage.
During this Jewish American Heritage Month and in this moment, I am wrestling with the question of how to honor that history in a way that makes the memory visible, shared, and alive.
That question is especially resonant in Boston, a city where public spaces convey powerful stories about who belongs. When Jewish history is made invisible, it is easier to imagine Jewish presence as conditional or marginal.
Antisemitism grows in environments where Jewish life is misunderstood, oversimplified, or pushed to the margins. But making Jewish history visible in shared civic space acknowledges its rightful place in the shared life of this city and disrupts hate. When Jewish stories are known and named, it becomes harder to reduce a community to stereotypes or to silence its presence altogether. Belonging, it turns out, is not only a value but a protective force. Cultures that make room for people to show up fully are more resistant to hate, more accountable to one another, and better equipped to uphold dignity across difference.
That is why partnerships like the one between Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Embrace Boston matter so deeply. Our collaboration through Embrace’s Everyone250 initiative, including the launch of the upcoming historical marker at the Vilna Shul as part of E250’s Monuments & Markers initiative, is not simply about honoring a site. It is about affirming that Jewish life, memory, and contributions remain an integral part of Boston’s story.
Put simply, we need these partnerships. Especially now.
The Vilna Shul stands as a symbol of immigrant resilience, community-building, and cultural continuity. Marking it publicly is not an act of nostalgia. It affirms that Jewish stories belong in the open, alongside the many other histories that shape this city, and that pluralism is strongest when it is visible.
At a moment when many communities are asking if they truly belong, Jewish American Heritage Month offers a powerful rebuttal: belonging grows when people are seen as they are, not flattened or hidden. When individuals and institutions have the confidence to name their histories, it creates space for others to do the same.
History, then, is not only something we remember or inherit; it is something we practice. We practice it by choosing partnership over isolation, visibility over erasure, and shared memory over silence. We practice it so that future generations can look around this city and see themselves in its story.
Jewish American Heritage Month is not only about where we have been. It is about the kind of city we want to be: one that honors its many histories, makes room for differences, and understands that shared humanity is strengthened, not weakened, by visible, confident identities.
That is the future that history invites us to build.
Melissa Garlick is an associate vice president at Combined Jewish Philanthropies, where she leads the Center for Combating Antisemitism.