Right in our own backyard, within a one-hour drive from Pikesville, there are wonderful places to visit, most at no charge.

Historic Jerusalem Mills Village

This Quaker village, dating back to the late 1700s, is one of the oldest and most intact mill villages in the United States, where grain was milled from 1772 until 1961. The village, which sits along the Little Gunpowder Falls in Kingsville, Maryland, is in the process of a total restoration thanks to a volunteer organization, the Friends of Jerusalem Mills. The village consists of a restored grist mill, the miller’s house, a still functioning blacksmith shop, a tenant house, McCourtney’s general store, the Jerusalem mansion, a springhouse, a smokehouse/dairy, and the ruins of a large bank barn. All buildings were constructed in the 1700s and 1800s. Adjacent to the village is the intact Jerusalem covered bridge, one of only six in Maryland. There is a lot of history in the village. During the Revolutionary War, gunstocks for the Maryland Militia were produced in the cooperage located behind the mill, and during the Civil War, Confederate troops conducted a raid at McCourtney’s general store.

In the summer of 2019, my wife and I visited the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and had the opportunity to see a remarkable exhibition about Adolfo Kaminsky, a man credited with saving the lives of at least 10,000 Jews in France during World War II. 

The Early Years

Adolfo Kaminsky’s parents were Russian Jews who met and married in Paris.  His mother had fled to Paris from the pogroms in Russia, and his father, a journalist for a Jewish Marxist newspaper in Russia, was forced to leave. Because of his father’s alleged ties to the Jewish Labor Bund, Adolfo’s parents were expelled from France and spent time in Turkey and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Adolfo was born in 1925. They later returned to France, eventually settling in the town of Vire, in Normandy, in 1932.

The family was poor, and young Adolfo soon found work as a clothes dyer and dry cleaner, where he learned the magic of colors and how to use various chemicals. Kaminsky also worked on a dairy farm, where he performed chemical tests to verify milk quality and discovered that lactic acid could be used to remove supposedly indelible black ink from paper. These skills would serve him well in his work for the French Resistance during World War II.

Baltimore is blessed to have a number of beautiful urban parks, many interconnected as part of the Baltimore Greenway Trails Network, ringing our city with a green canopy. A further treat is that several of the parks, described below, contain impressive summer mansions built in the mid-1800s by some of Baltimore’s most famous titans of industry and recently faithfully restored. Taking a walk or hike through these parks gives one a better understanding of the early history of our city.

The benefits of regular exercise for our physical and mental well-being are well known. This was especially true during the height of the pandemic, and many of us took the opportunity to get out and walk around our neighborhoods, Quarry Lake, Meadowbrook Park and other local nature areas. Baltimoreans are also blessed to have beautiful walking/hiking/biking trails along local abandoned railroad lines. In addition to the exercise, these make for a wonderful family outing on Chol Hamoed Sukkos or anytime. Described below are some of the most accessible and popular.

Although a transplanted Baltimorean, I have come to appreciate my quirky adopted city. Baltimore has its warts and has endured tough times, but over the years the city and its citizens have been ahead of the curve in many ways to the betterment of us all. It’s worth sharing a few Baltimore and Baltimorean “firsts,” some familiar and some perhaps not so well known. Readers may have their own favorite Baltimore firsts.

As the world is starting to undertake an unprecedented vaccination effort to control the current pandemic, it might be useful to look at other historic vaccination programs.

Smallpox

Attempts at smallpox vaccination have gone on for many centuries using material from the smallpox pustules of people with mild cases or from cowpox pustules to inoculate healthy persons. The most widely recorded example occurred in 1768 when Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, allowed a Scottish physician to inoculate (vaccinate) her. She developed a mild case, recovered after two weeks, and then had fluid from her own pustules used to inoculate her son and members of her court. After Catherine’s heroic action, inoculation became quickly accepted, and by 1780 two million inoculations were administered in the Russian Empire. An alternative and improved method of vaccination was introduced in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who noted that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox, a skin infection caused by a virus related to the smallpox virus, did not get smallpox. He removed fluid from the cowpox pustules of a young dairymaid and inoculated an eight-year old boy. The child developed a mild fever but recovered – a successful but highly unethical experiment.