Jeff Mazer, OJMCHE Board President, announced that Executive Director Judy Margles will retire at the end of 2023. He added, “Judy’s contribution to our community’s understanding of its past and its commitment to a better future cannot be overstated. For the last 24 years, she has been a guiding force in the evolution of OJMCHE and the strengthening of the museum’s mission.”
“This seems like the right time to put this amazing organization into somebody else’s capable hands,” said Judy Margles. “We are about to complete a major expansion that adds a core exhibition focused on human rights to our offerings, the only gallery of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. I look back on the past two plus decades with the deepest gratitude. Today—as it has been every day—it is my enormous privilege to work with this extraordinary community as we complete this stage of the museum’s evolution.”
During her tenure, Judy led the museum through unprecedented growth and innovation. She joined the museum in 1999 after 10 years as a curator at OMSI. One of her earliest exhibitions, Arnold Mesches: A Century Survey, was created in partnership with the Pacific Northwest College of Art and became the first of many collaborations with local and national institutions that positioned OJMCHE, and Judy herself, as both a community resource and a highly respected thought leader in the field.
Judy curated and managed countless exhibitions, from the intensely beautiful to the deeply disturbing. She initiated the museum’s ongoing emphasis on community-based exhibitions and on building a significant regional archive and artifact collection that today includes over 15,000 photographs, 1,000 oral histories, and 2,500 objects. She was at the helm when the museum merged with the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center that stewarded the Oregon Holocaust Memorial in Washington Park, creating what is now the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Judy also expanded the Museum’s education programming and contributed to the development of Oregon’s SB 664, a bill mandating Holocaust and genocide education throughout the state’s schools. During her tenure, she oversaw the museum through three moves before the purchase, renovation, and opening in 2017 of OJMCHE’s home on NW Davis Street.
Jeff Mazer stated that the OJMCHE Board has hired a national search firm to find the right person to build the unique combination of programs, exhibitions, and community engagement that will help OJMCHE achieve its vision: to create a world that upholds and values truth, history, and justice.