The JCC of Greater Baltimore hosted its biannual Community Block Party on Sunday, April 7, bringing together local community members, businesses and Jewish organizations.
Thousands of people flocked to the Rosenbloom Owings Mills JCC campus to enjoy food, games and fun; peruse the offerings from local businesses and learn more about vibrant community offerings.
Many local community organizations had booths at the block party, from synagogues like Baltimore Hebrew Congregation and Kol HaLev to more secular institutions like Maryland Public Television. Kosher food offerings included baked goods, sushi, pizza and the Kona Ice truck. While parents shopped around, children could enjoy inflatable slides and obstacle courses, a petting zoo, balloon animals and a toy drive hosted by the family support organization H.E.Y. HUB.
Overall, there were 150 booths in total, and approximately 3,000 attendees over the course of the party’s five-hour duration. These included several current and former elected officials, such as former Gov. Larry Hogan and Baltimore City Council Chairman Izzy Patoka (D-2).
The JCC first started hosting Community Block Party events in 2014. They were an annual affair until 2020, when that year’s and 2021’s fair were both canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Block parties resumed in 2022, but the JCC decided to have them occur once every other year instead of every year, to be able to better organize sponsors, gather resources and bring in vendors.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of operational logistics pieces to make sure that we can accommodate everyone,” said Paul Lurie, the JCC of Greater Baltimore’s chief operating officer. “We build partnerships with new organizations that we want to be able to showcase, and we do vendor outreach to local businesses who want to represent themselves.”
While the Community Block Party is always a day of fun, this year’s had a somber note to it — April 7 marked six months since the events of Oct. 7 in Israel. Lurie noted that the community’s Israeli offerings were brought to its forefront because of this, and especially because planning for the Block Party started in fall 2023.
“The situation in Israel was on our minds when we started planning, but we weren’t sure what the long-term impact was going to be,” he explained. “Because it took place on the six-month anniversary, we wanted to be very intentional. We showcased Israeli dance, worked with the Shinshinim and tried to put it at the front of people’s minds. We wanted to be sure that they had a great time, but still kept what’s happening in other parts of the world in mind.”
He added that the event received a lot of positive feedback from community members, who were impressed by the amount of organizations and businesses represented and found that there were many opportunities to learn about what makes the local community unique.
“We’re pretty happy with our current model. We always want to engage more partner organizations. When we created this event, we wanted to call it the Community Block Party rather than the JCC Block Party very intentionally, so we could engage the community,” Lurie said of his hopes for the next Community Block Party in 2026. “We want to keep building on the success we had with this event and keep engaging more people and more vendors.”
