By Elizabeth Mehren (August 26, 2025)
Rebekah Sobel, the museum's executive director since December 2023, is aiming for a trifecta of highlighting Jewish culture, Jewish art, and managing trauma stories.
So, Portland, are you ready for an exhibit of Judaica-themed psychedelic skateboards?
Rebekah Sobel, executive director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education — she dares you to pronounce the acronym, OJMCHE — is betting that a forthcoming display of works by an impressively bearded guy known as “The Top Dog of Kosher Pop Art” will entice new visitors as well as returnees.
Steve Marcus, a Hassidic rabbi who works out of New York’s Lower East Side, creates quirky, often comical folk art that celebrates Jewish life. A recent Marcus exhibit, for example, revolves around what one reviewer called “one of the many great Jewish contributions to American culture: the hot dog.”
“Joy!” Sobel exclaimed during an interview in her museum office. Then she switched to her more serious museum-director mode and said: “Transformational, that’s the word we use here.”
Or, to be even more museum-director-like: “Taking history and infusing an exploratory identity.”
After a 25-year career in a series of different museums, Sobel, 53, took over at OJMCHE just days after longtime director Judy Margles retired in December, 2023. The timing was good: Southern California native Sobel had been itching to move back West after several decades on the East Coast.
But it was also not-so good, because Sobel’s two children weren’t keen on moving in the middle of a school year, and as her son was preparing for his bar mitzvah. Family negotiations ensued, resulting for Sobel in an eight-month commute each weekend from Portland to Washington, D.C. — and then back again to Portland for work on Monday. Things smoothed out just over a year ago, when the whole family settled into a house in Northeast Portland and the kids, now 10 and 14, started new schools here.
Sobel’s interest in running OJMCHE went far beyond geography. In the 1990s, Sobel started out at UC-Irvine as a pre-med major. She switched to something called social ecology — the kind of major, as any parent will attest, that makes a mom or dad say, “great, but how do you plan to get a job?” She did a study-abroad year at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, then plunged into graduate work in anthropology at Temple University. Her specialty there was “anthropology of visual communication,” no doubt prompting more parental questions about employment possibilities.
They needn’t have worried. Sobel spent 10 years in various posts at the United States Holocaust Museum, including a stint in audience development. At the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum, a site devoted to exploring “the Jewish experience in the national capital region,” she served as director of interpretation. Her last job before moving to Portland was as policy director for museum programs at the National Archives.
That kind of experience in project management with nonprofits was part of what sold the search committee on Sobel, said Liz Lippoff, OJMCHE’s board president.
“We knew we were never going to get anyone who knew as much about the museum as Judy,” she said, referring to Margles’ 24-year history with a local institution that morphed from a “museum without walls” to a sturdy presence on Portland’s North Park Blocks that in 2023 won the Western Museum Association’s annual leadership award.
In Sobel, Lippoff continued, OJMCHE not only found someone with “common values,” but also a seasoned museum professional who knew something about strategic planning.
“We were at a point where we needed to decide where we are going to go from here,” said Lippoff. Margles herself had been among the leading proponents of Oregon SB 664, mandating the teaching of Holocaust education in public schools. But the program, launched in the 2020-21 school year, remains unfunded. Spreading the accessibility of Holocaust education materials to educators throughout the state has been a key priority, Lippoff said. For that matter, she added, “There’s no reason why we can’t be a national resource on this.”
Which is exactly where Sobel comes in. When the three-year strategic plan she inherited ended in June of this year, Sobel got to work crafting a comprehensive new strategic plan. This meant a long, hard look at what the museum is, and what it wants to be.
“People say we are helpful in managing trauma stories,” Sobel said. In terms of identity, she went on, “For some people we fall under ‘art,’ and for some we fall in the ‘Jewish’ space.”
Why not be all three — and maybe even more?, she figured. After all, “we are the only Jewish museum and the only Holocaust museum north of L.A.”
Sobel is eager to expand the museum’s offerings throughout the state. This could mean enlarging the reach of OJMCHE’s teacher fellowship program. It could mean traveling exhibits. It could mean a collecting tour across the state, gathering stories and materials and audiences. It definitely means educational efforts to combat a rising national wave of anti-Semitism.
Figures from the Anti-Defamation League, as well as a 2025 report from The Large Communities Task Force Against Anti-Semitism, documented 9,354 acts of anti-Semitism in the United States in 2024. According to the ADL, that number reflected a 344% increase over the previous five years.
For OJMCHE, those statistics may hit a little too close to home. Earlier this summer, museum staffers arrived to find blue swastikas painted on the front door, and also on an outside photo mural. Portland police have investigated the incident as a hate crime. It was the first such episode at the museum, but not elsewhere in Portland.
Clearly, one Portland museum can’t singlehandedly staunch this tide. But Sobel is intent on finding new ways not only “to better reach those teachers who are reaching out to us,” but also to connect with “the teachers who don’t ask for us.” One example of this effort is the kindergarten-through-grade-5 book box that OJMCHE has prepared. With an active speakers’ bureau, the museum also matches schools with in-person speakers and lecturers.
Sobel said OJMCHE also works closely with schools to bring students to museum exhibits, often paired with lectures and live events, that broadly address matters of discrimination.
A current exhibit called Outliers and Outlaws, for instance, examines the vibrant lesbian community of Eugene from the 1960s to the 1990s. The show — running through Oct. 26 — presents the stories of 83 women who helped shape the city’s social and political landscape, battling discriminatory policies and challenging traditional norms. One recent evening, the Portland Lesbian Choir performed in the exhibit space.
Another exhibit that runs through late October, Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis, features works by Portland photographer Jason Langer. As a young boy living on an Israeli kibbutz, Langer formed deep impressions both of the Holocaust and of Germany. Years later, he set out to confront those fears by taking his camera to Berlin.
Nearly all major museum exhibits are planned several years in advance, Sobel said. Her own museum-director fingerprints will become more evident with the Marcus/Top Dog of Kosher Art project, as well as upcoming exhibition of works by California artist Cara Levine. Levine uses her art to focus on trauma, Sobel said. As part of the exhibit, Levine will be in residence at OJMCHE, creating art on site.
“We’re trying all kinds of different things to bring people into the museum,” Sobel said.
Later in the fall, she said, OJMCHE’s former café space will reopen as a lounge area, “a quiet resting place” to offer a kind of “non-trauma” relief from some of the inevitably difficult content in certain exhibits. Sobel is working to bring “younger Jewish singles and families” into the museum.
OJMCHE is continuing to expand its involvement in the Portland Jewish Film Festival, Sobel said. She would like to keep marquee exhibits for longer stays than in the past. She wants to see more public lectures in different venues — especially public discussions addressing the issue of rising anti-Semitism. Her goal, she said, is to try to understand trauma through healing.
“This is a city of bridges,” Sobel said. “We want to build bridges.”
Toward that end, Sobel has been meeting with her counterparts at Lang Su Chinese Garden, the Portland Chinatown Museum and the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. Like OJMCHE, all are located in downtown/Old Town — areas where issues of homelessness, crime and substance abuse in Portland are often most visible.
But Sobel is optimistic. A new hotel, the Cambria, recently opened almost directly across the street from OJMCHE, she noted. Still, she conceded, many cultural centers around the country are still trying to rebuild after the pandemic downturn.
Sobel admits she knew “only a little bit” about Jewish history in Portland before she arrived here. But no sooner did she accept the OJMCHE job than she discovered that her own grandfather, David Biatch, had lived for a time in Portland’s Laurelhurst neighborhood before moving to Southern California. Proudly, Sobel whipped out her cell phone to display a photo of her own son standing beside a photograph of his great-grandfather at Portland’s Mittleman Jewish Community Center.
What she has learned, in her own listening tour of her new city and environs, is that “there isn’t one ‘Jewish community’ here. There are many.”
Along with Jewish history, Sobel and her family have been exploring the local artisanal/natural food and beverage scene. Her husband is interested in brewing beer, she said, and “we’re both IPA fans — actually, I’m a hazy IPA fan.”
Her husband, an architect and real estate developer, also leapt at the chance to move to Portland because of the proximity to good skiing, Sobel said. Their son also has taken to the nearby slopes of Mt. Hood.
One reason she wanted the OJMCHE job was that a small museum “was more my style,” Sobel said.
“But also I was attracted to this position because this museum is small, solid and supported,” she went on. “This museum has strong, deep community roots.”
And then there was the surprise family history component. The welcoming contingent of other local cultural institutions. The opportunity to grow and to expand educational outreach at a critical time. The theme here is clear, Sobel said: “Things fall into place sometimes.”
Elizabeth Mehren is a writer and journalist based in Portland. She is the author or co-author of five books, including “I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War.”