When I was a college junior, I went on a Spring Break trip to Washington with the Harvard Young Democrats. There were maybe a dozen or so of us, and as this was 1963 and the Kennedy years, we were given the royal treatment.

I remember that one of our meetings was with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his dark wood paneled office in the Department of Justice, with refrigerator quality art work by his many young children taped to all the walls. I don’t remember what the topics of our conversation were, but I do remember Kennedy making it very clear at the beginning of our session that everything he was saying, he was saying “off the record”.

One of the students on our trip was a Harvard Crimson writer. I remember, after we got back to Cambridge, opening the paper one morning and seeing an article about our trip. The article referred to our meeting with Bobby Kennedy and started off with the words “Speaking off the record, Kennedy said ……..” And then it went on to detail everything he told us.

Well, this morning I attended a breakfast session with DC Ward 3 Councilman Matt Frumin, and about 15 others. Frumin’s remarks were all “off the record”. So, there you are. Had they been on the record, I would tell you that the biggest and best surprises that Frumin had after being elected were that the Council members all get along with each other so well, and that the Council is really made up of talented people. If this gets out and is attributable to me, I will deny every word of it.

It was an interesting conversation about many Ward 3 interests – interestingly, little was raised that affected DC outside of this ward. No one asked about crime, or whether the Commanders should have a new stadium built at the current RFK (speaking of Bobby Kennedy) site, or why there weren’t sufficient groceries in Ward 8, or how to bring back downtown. I guess it’s true — all politics are local.

So we spoke about traffic cameras, and school expansions, and development sites, and the proposed Connecticut Avenue bicycle lanes, and the redevelopment of the Chevy Chase Library and Community Center, and the role of Metro buses in revitalizing the neighborhood, and the future of the Intelsat building, the status of Metro garage and turnaround sites, the Massachusetts Avenue Safeway and more. We really stayed within the ‘hood.

Yesterday, on the other hand, politics was not involved in the visit we made to the new Capital Jewish Museum. We were there before it opened for the day for a special tour for my Thursday morning breakfast group and their presumably significant others.

The Museum is very well done. We visited the large exhibit rooms on the first and second floors which tell the story of Jewish Washington quite well from the days of the Isaac Polock, the first recorded evidence of a Jew in Washington. His residency dated from 1795, just 5 years after the founding of the city by Congress. Then, Polock was alone – now there are about 300,000 Jews in the greater DC area.

The museum is built around the oldest synagogue building in Washington, the Adas Israel congregation building that dates from 1876, and served the congregation about 25 years when it was sold and replaced by the building at 6th and I Streets NW that now serves as a community center, the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. The current Adas building dates from early 1950s. The second floor sanctuary of the original building has been restored, and as you sit on original benches, you see a three sided film about the history of the building and the history of the Washington Jewish Community. Edie and I went with our 8 year old granddaughter, who liked the film and the exhibits and I think got quite a bit out of the 90 minutes or so we were there.

On the second floor, among many other things, there is a wall which shows photographs of 100 (I think that’s the number) of prominent Jews in Washington through the years. Interestingly, I could probably identify and tell you at least something about 75 or so of them. I was happy to see included was my great uncle Moshe Rubin Yoelson, my paternal grandfather’s older brother, who presided over the Talmud Torah congregation in Southwest Washington for decades. He died in 1945, well before I moved to town. But his tomb in Southeast Washington is very impressive.

The third floor contains a temporary exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which will be there until, I think, November 30. We told our granddaughter we would come back to see it. Edie and I saw it several years ago at the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It was quite well done, and now – after Justice Ginsburg has passed away – we understand it has been somewhat expanded.

That’s it for today. Getting ready to celebrate grandson Izzy’s 3rd birthday this evening.