A museum is usually considered a place for recreation and intellectual enrichment — not a place for therapy.
A new program now offered at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee — SPARK! Cultural Programming for People with Memory Loss — is showing that museum objects can help build connections between people experiencing memory loss and those who love and/or care for them.
“The idea is sparking something — creativity, conversation, communication,” said Ellie Gettinger, education director of JMM, a program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. “It’s about getting people to engage in whatever way they have available.”
The first program took place Dec. 5 and was called “A Celebration of Light.”
The session started with a selection of menorahs from the JMM archive, and a discussion about them and about Chanukah.
It also involved telling a Chanukah-related story and an art project, “because making art provides people with the means of having some kind of creative engagement,” Gettinger said. “Studies have shown that these are things people can latch onto that provide a vehicle for communicating that speech may not convey.”
Each session lasts 90 minutes, beginning with an exploration of specific pieces either on display or in the collection’s archives. Then participants create their own projects.
The morning concludes with a social period, which Gettinger said is particularly important for caregivers.
“It’s a time for children or spouses or siblings of people experiencing memory loss to meet and talk through some of the issues they may be dealing with,” she said.
Currently, sessions are scheduled through August of 2015. Topics include fashion, immigration, Israel, peddlers, Jewish weddings and baseball.
All but two are held on the first Friday of the month, from 10-11:30 a.m. January and July, because of New Year’s Day and July 4th, are the exceptions.
The program is offered free of charge to community members who are living at home. Participants don’t have to be Jewish.
It is funded by a grant from the Helen Bader Foundation. In her lifetime, Helen Bader was a social worker who worked at the Milwaukee Jewish Home with people who had Alzheimer’s disease. In that capacity, she was able to directly experience the effect of arts programming on individuals with memory loss.
“They are really the leaders regionally,” Gettinger said of the foundation. “We are one of 15 museums they have funded to do this project, and the first of these museums started running SPARK! programs six years ago.”
Gettinger said she has had personal experience dealing with family members who have Alzheimer’s disease and dementia; but engaging with a population as a professional is very different.
“I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable doing this if I didn’t have my partners at the Jewish Home and Care Center’s Adult Day Center,” she said. “They know what the most cutting-edge issues are and they use the arts in so many different ways. It’s been amazing to brainstorm with them and explore how we connect what they do with what we have here in the museum.”
Gettinger recently attended a SPARK! conference at the Racine Art Museum, where she heard about things that have happened in other programs.
She shared a report of an exchange after a session in which a wife said that her farmer husband hadn’t said anything about farming for years until he participated in this program.
“Things like that can somehow bubble up with the right push,” she said, “so I am feeling like this is the ultimate mitzvah this museum can do.”
For further information or to register for the program, contact Gettinger at 414-390-5742 or educator@JewishMuseumMilwaukee.org.
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer, retention alert coordinator at Milwaukee Area Technical College and winner of a 2013 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
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