Emily Goodman grew up in Owings Mills attending Beth Israel Congregation, surrounded by Jewish family members and friends. Jewish identity “was always a part of our lives,” she said. “I was surrounded by a largely Jewish community outside of the synagogue too. Most of my friends from school were also Jewish. It’s always been something that’s been very prominent in my life.”
But for a few years, her Jewish identity slipped into the back seat. Attending Towson University, Goodman explained, she was one of the only Jewish people in her friend group. She resolved that partly by becoming involved at the Towson Hillel and Chabad while she studied gerontology, the study of aging.
After college, however, the feeling of something being amiss returned. “I spent a few years working at Johns Hopkins, doing Alzheimer’s research, and after a while, I just felt really out of touch with the Jewish part of my life. … I just felt a need to fill some of that void,” she said.
She initially got a job in 2018 as a program coordinator for both the Baltimore Jewish Council and the Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel. Then, a position to work with Holocaust survivors opened up in 2020 at the BJC. Goodman applied for and got the job that December.
Her upbringing and background in gerontology, she said, made the transition seamless.
“When I came into this role, it was previously a part-time role that was focused solely on Holocaust work, and then — after the attacks at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life synagogue — the BJC found that it really wanted to add antisemitism specifically to the portfolio, and so the part-time position that was focused on the Holocaust became a full-time position focused on both Holocaust and countering antisemitism work,” she explained. “The two topics are pretty hand in hand … a lot of using Holocaust as education to combat antisemitism, and then teaching about the Holocaust, you’re also teaching about antisemitism in a historical lens.”
Goodman said that since the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, her work has changed: “We’ve, of course, seen a drastic uptick in antisemitism here in America and our state is not an exception.”
One of her biggest initiatives within BJC, Goodman said, is promoting the agency’s Holocaust Survivors Speakers Bureau, a program that educates audiences about the Holocaust and genocide through Holocaust survivor testimony.
“We’ve got dozens of speakers, most of which are descendants of survivors who want to share their families’ Holocaust testimony, and it’s a really great free resource for our community that I think a lot of people don’t know about,” Goodman said. “They have the opportunity to have somebody come in and talk to — whether it’s a school group or a congregation — to have these personal Holocaust stories shared to them, and that’s the most effective tool for teaching about the Holocaust.”
Goodman, who now lives in Timonium, said one of her goals is to travel to Europe and visit the sites of internment camps and ghettos where the victims of the Holocaust lived, both before and after the great tragedy.
“I think it would be really meaningful and [a] full circle to know these survivors and their stories and then get to see with my own eyes where and what they experienced,” she said.
“It definitely makes me feel really proud as a Jewish individual to know that this is important work and that I get to do this,” she added. “As a mother of a young Jewish boy, I take it very personally to do this work so I can make the world a better place for him to grow up in as a Jewish person and as a person in general.”
