This year’s Pesach begins when Shabbos ends, allowing for a longer Chol HaMoed during the week. For readers planning their own Pesach programs at home, here are the opportunities for tourism with little traveling involved.
They’re in Queens
Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, and the museum has an exhibit, Billion Dollar Dream, on view through July 13, on the technological promise of that event, while the controversies of its time relating to civil rights, labor relations, and the Cold War made their way into the fairgrounds. The exhibit shows the great park of today, covered with buildings representing countries, companies, and organizations inside a future as it was imagined by people in the 1960s.
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street, Corona
For this close-to-home attraction, you may want to wait until after Pesach, when the exhibit CityWorks opens on May 3, showing how the city’s infrastructure works. It’s ideal for the future architect, engineer, or urban planner. In the meantime, there’s Powering the City, which shows how the power grid works, efforts to conserve energy, and how it powers our daily life. The Big Bubble Experiment also offers interactive experimentation for young visitors. Along with these exhibits, there are more than 450 permanent displays in total at the Hall of Science, including rockets from the early years of the space race that stand inside the center’s mini-golf course.
Queens County Farm Museum
73-50 Little Neck Parkway, Floral Park
Sure, our borough has plenty of green rooftops, community gardens, backyard plots, and windowsill spices, but the largest and last true farm in the borough is in Floral Park, taking up 47 acres. In operation since 1697, this farm has livestock, heavy farm machinery, planting fields, and a vineyard. Events on its calendar include a children’s carnival, antique motor show, and a Native American pow-wow. Fall activities here include the corn maze and pumpkin picking.
King Manor Museum
150-03 Jamaica Avenue
In the heart of downtown Jamaica is one of the oldest mansions in Queens, home to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The park surrounding the King Manor is a 12-acre remnant of a 160-acre farm that belonged to Rufus King, the United States Senator, diplomat, and antislavery activist, who died in the 50th year of this country’s independence. The interior takes us back to the late 18th century, when Rufus King lived here.
Across from Rufus King Park, at 90-40 150th Street, is PS 182, but if you find the cornerstone, it offers a detail of local Jewish history. This was the original Yeshiva of Central Queens before it relocated to Kew Gardens Hills in the 1970s.
Bowne House
37-01 Bowne Street
The oldest standing dwelling in Queens, it dates to 1661, when Quaker colonist John Bowne settled in Flushing. He famously stood up for religious freedom when fellow members of his faith authored the Flushing Remonstrance addressing the Dutch authorities. Nine generations of Bownes lived in this home until it became a museum in 1945. Visitors can experience how they lived with period furniture and guides explaining what Flushing was like as an outpost. On the other side of the playground behind the Bowne House is the Kingsland Homestead, a house built during the American Revolution that hosts the Queens Historical Society.
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Astoria
In my childhood, when my parents shopped at the Costco in Astoria, I ventured to its neighbor, Socrates Sculpture Park, which has outdoor sculptures on the East River waterfront with views of Manhattan. Many of the sculptures are designed for interaction, to be touched, walked around, under, and through.
Laser Bounce Family Fun Center
80-28 Cooper Avenue, Glendale
Located in Atlas Park Mall, under the Regal Cinemas, this indoor amusement center offers many options for young visitors: bouncy surfaces, ball pit, bowling, arcades, laser tag, and virtual reality. For our Long Island readers, Laser Bounce has a location in Levittown at 2710 Hempstead Turnpike. When the weather is rainy, it is good to have a Laser Bounce close to home.
Far Rockaway Public Library
1637 Central Avenue
www.queenslibrary.org/about-us/locations/far-rockaway
Separated from the mainland of Queens by Jamaica Bay, the Rockaways Peninsula sometimes feels like its own borough, and if this is the case, the neighborhood of Far Rockaway is its commercial downtown. Last July, its public library branch reopened in a new 18,000-square-foot facility, whose triangular appearance redefined the surrounding streetscape.
The award-winning postmodern building is renowned for its energy efficiency and interior art by Mexican artist Pablo Helguera, honoring theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who grew up in the neighborhood.
Each of Queens Public Library’s branches has a unique design, with its own public art and literature relating to a neighborhood. As this branch has the most recently completed library in the borough, it is worth a visit while it still feels new.
Manhattan
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
One of the world’s greatest art museums has something for everyone. On view through May 11 is an exhibit on German romanticist Caspar David Friedrich, with 75 of his works on display from more than 30 collections brought together to this museum. His most famous work, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is among the most recognizable paintings in Western art history, joining his landscapes, thoughtful individuals, and architectural ruins that exemplify his art.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue
The official museum of this city has the colorful exhibit Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection on the subculture of “writers” who put their tags and slabs on subway trains and walls in the 1980s. What began as an illegal act became a genre of art that fetches commanding prices in galleries, museums, and outdoor billboards, transforming letters and numbers into complex arrangements of colors and lines. On view through August 10.
Our newspaper takes pride in encouraging readers to vote, so the exhibit Changing the Face of Democracy: Shirley Chisholm at 100 is special for having a voting booth with buttons and a lever on display. That’s how generations of New York citizens voted between the 1920s and 2011, before computer screens accepted a paper ballot with the choices penciled in. The first Black woman elected to Congress represented her Brooklyn district during a time of significant social, economic, and political upheaval that offers lessons for today’s voters. On view through July 20.
MoMATH: National
Museum of Mathematics
225 Fifth Avenue
Created to “enhance public understanding and perception of mathematics,” this museum is preparing to move into a larger space on Sixth Avenue in 2026. In the meantime, it has more than 30 activities and displays relating to how numbers appear in nature, shapes, and art, revealing the presence of math in everything around us.
Lincoln Center
Broadway at West 65th Street
This modernist campus is the home of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet. Alongside the music, dancing, films, and songs, there is also visual art to be seen with two Marc Chagall murals painted in 1966 for the Metropolitan Opera: The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music. Designed by Philip Johnson, the modernist collection of buildings and plazas was updated at the turn of the millennium to make Lincoln Center appear more inviting. Visitors can learn about its history and cultural role at the gift shop and library, or by taking a 75-minute guided tour that includes backstage access.
One Vanderbilt
1 Vanderbilt Avenue
The glassy skyscraper towering next to Grand Central Terminal has the newest observation deck in Manhattan, titled The Summit. To reach it, visitors take a glass elevator with views of the city as they rise to nearly 1,400 feet above 42nd Street. One can stand on a glass floor that juts out of the top floor and see the nearby Empire State Building from a unique angle that nearly rivals its height. It’s ideal for sunsets.
Next door, inside Grand Central Terminal, there is the Transit Museum Store that offers exhibits on the history of the subway and plenty of model trains, toys, and children’s books about it. Our Long Island readers can take the train to Grand Central Terminal, see its new mosaic installations, and then take the elevator to the top without having to go outdoors.
In Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
The Beaux Arts landmark has its permanent collection of ancient historical art from around the world, a colonial Dutch farmhouse transported inside the museum, and its ancient Egyptian collection. Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 celebrates the institution in three chapters as its building and collection grew, along with a statement on its future. Next to the museum is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, ideal for a spring photo shoot amid the cherry blossoms.
Building 92 at Brooklyn
Navy Yard
63 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
From 1801 through 1966, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was the arsenal of democracy that produced fearsome battleships and weapons that preserved our independence, saved the Union, projected American power, and defended our allies. After the Navy left Brooklyn, this complex became a hub of light industry and tech innovation. This free-admission museum offers displays on the history and present use of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It is within a short drive from Williamsburg, where one can shop for kosher items.
New York Transit Museum
99 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn
Located inside a subway station that was abandoned in 1946 and reopened 30 years later as a museum, its tracks hold more than a century of historic rolling stock. Step inside these old subway cars to see advertisements from decades past. On the mezzanine level are displays and artifacts relating to the construction of the country’s largest and only 24-hour transit system.
Kids’n’Action
1149 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn
Sometimes it rains on Chol HaMoed, and the temperature doesn’t feel like spring has arrived. An indoor play center can fulfill the child’s desire to climb, jump, and compete for prizes. Located between Borough Park and Midwood, this indoor amusement park is close to the kosher establishments that are open for the chametz-free holiday.
Jewish Content
Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge Street
The historic synagogue of the Lower East Side opened in 1886 as the crown of the immigrant neighborhood and was restored in the 1990s as a museum of Jewish life.
On exhibit at this time is Lower East Side, 1975: Portrait of a Changing Jewish Neighborhood, a collection of photos from a time when the neighborhood was more Latino than Jewish, not yet gentrified, in a year when the city’s financial situation was in crisis. On view through May 11.
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
This center hosts five vital institutions that document the stories of Jews in America through art, artifacts, and literature: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Yeshiva University Museum, YIVO, and Leo Baeck Institute, each with their own exhibits and opportunities to research our past.
Currently on view: Anne Frank, The Exhibition, brings a reconstruction of the Holocaust victim’s hiding room and its artifacts. It brings context to her family and four other individuals, most of whom did not survive the war, but whose stories resulted in posthumous fame. On view through Oct. 31.
70 Years of LBI: Bridging Generations highlights the work of the Leo Baeck Institute, which captures the culture and history of German Jews through photos, videos, and events. This organization also has on display The Vienna Model of Radicalization: Austria and the Shoah, showing how quickly Jews lost their status and safety after the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria.
The YIVO exhibit Runaway Husbands, Desperate Families: The Story of the National Desertion Bureau, traces the history of the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish nonprofit that tracked down runaway husbands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ensuring justice for the abandoned wives and children. Through its detective work, the number of such irresponsible men declined.
Finally, there is Jewish Fighters in the Red Army as we observe the 80th anniversary since the end of World War II. More than 400,000 Jews served in the Soviet army, risking their lives for patriotism and to avenge the Holocaust. Their stories were downplayed by the regime, preserved by their families, and shared publicly after they immigrated to America and Israel.
Museum of Jewish Heritage
One Battery Place
Along with its permanent collection of artifacts from the Holocaust, the exhibit Judy Glickman Lauder: The Danish Exception, is a photo collection from 1993 documenting Danish Jews who fled ahead of a planned Nazi roundup, along with Danish Resistance members who risked their lives to rescue these Jews. This exhibit appears in partnership with Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark on the nation that rescued 95 percent of its Jews through grassroots resistance, an exception to the Holocaust.
Beyond the City
LONG ISLAND
Cradle of Aviation Museum
Charles Lindbergh Boulevard, Garden City
A former hangar transformed into a museum of air and space technology. It currently has exhibits on drones and the early “flying boats” of the late Pan American Airlines. The latter is produced by the Pan Am Museum Foundation, a nonprofit created by former employees and airplane enthusiasts to preserve the history of this pioneering airline company.
Nassau County Museum of Art
One Museum Drive, Roslyn
The grounds of this museum are the former property of naturalist William Cullen Bryant and industrialist Henry Clay Frick. As visitors drive into the museum, the lawns feature sculptures designed to fit into their setting. It is the Long Island version of Hudson Valley’s Storm King Art Center, smaller in size but free and with fall foliage to match the artworks. Then there is the mansion with its Gold Coast opulence. Current exhibits include Deco at 100, on the centennial of the Paris exhibition that launched the Art Deco style in art and architecture. New York adopted this style with apartments on the Grand Concourse, skyscrapers in Midtown, and fashion on Long Island’s Gold Coast, where this museum stands.
Adventureland
2245 Broadhollow Road, Farmingdale
I have not visited Adventureland since I was in summer camp. Long Island’s longest-operating amusement park struck me as a street fair permanently moored in place with rides that are standard across the country, such as a swinging pirate ship, carousel, and log flume. I had no idea that in 2015, it welcomed Turbulence, a new roller coaster that has become its star attraction. This new ride serves as an extra reason to revisit this blast from the past.
American Airpower Museum
1230 New Highway, Farmingdale
www.americanairpowermuseum.com
Within a ten-minute drive from Adventureland is the American Airpower Museum. If you live on Long Island and have been to Cradle of Aviation too many times, this former airport-turned-museum is the local alternative. More than a dozen fighter aircraft and parts can be seen at this museum.
Valley Stream Historical Society
143 Hendrickson Avenue, Valley Stream
www.valleystreamlibrary.org/vshistpagan.htm
At the southern tip of Valley Stream State Park is a historic mansion that predates the suburbanization of Long Island, when the Village of Valley Stream had a rural appearance. The Pagan-Fletcher Restoration contains old maps of the area and other displays relating to the history of this village and its surroundings. The state park outside this mansion is one of the smallest, with a playground, picnic area, and paths through a dense woodland.
NEW JERSEY
American Dream Mall
One American Dream Way
East Rutherford, NJ
After hearing about it from my daughter’s classmates in school and bunkmates in camp, my family took the trip to the American Dream Mall in the Meadowlands. Even when it’s not Chol HaMoed, this destination mall is filled with frum families eager to taste popular American foods with a hechsher, and to feel satisfaction that this mall was built by the Ghermezian family, whose philanthropy sustains many educational projects in the Jewish community.
We did not feel like paying for an indoor amusement park when it is sunny outside, or a water park that is only a fraction of Mountain Creek and Splish Splash? Nor did we feel that the novelty of an indoor ski slope was worth the price when we could wait a few months until the slopes of the Catskills and Poconos reopen.
For a family on a budget seeking unique thrills, the indoor skating rink, mini-golf, and candy store would be worth experiencing. If you have friends in Lakewood, Monsey, or west of the City, this mall could be a good place to meet up and have fun.
New Jersey Historical Society
52 Park Place, Newark
The renaissance of downtown Newark continues as its skyline rises, and its cultural attractions are not much of a secret anymore. The New Jersey Historical Society highlights the unique stories of the Garden State across the street from a historic city park. Inside are exhibits on the state’s waterways, Robert R. Max’s experiences in the military as he survived Nazi captivity, and Princeton professor Albert Einstein’s contribution to the movement combating racial discrimination.
A short walk from the historical society is the Newark Museum of Art, with a respectable collection of artifacts from abroad and artworks that relate to New Jersey.
Urban Air Adventure Park
396 Ryders Lane, Milltown
1600 St. Georges Avenue, Avenel
69 Wesley Street, South Hackensack
When rain and wind interfere with fall foliage and the temperature is too chilly for a walk, Urban Air Adventure Park offers three indoor locations in New Jersey. The family-friendly facility offers ample space for bouncing, climbing, virtual reality, and sports.
Six Flags Great Adventure
1 Six Flags Blvd, Jackson Township, NJ
www.sixflags.com/greatadventure
This year, the largest amusement park in the Northeast marks its 50th year in operation. To remain profitable, customer loyalty is key, as parents experience rides from their childhood and introduce their offspring to new rides relating to popular movies and comics.
Vertical Velocity is the park’s 15th roller coaster, which will be followed this summer with The Flash, a roller coaster reaching 60 miles per hour. Among the original rides, Sawmill Log Flume and Giant Wheel, formerly known as the Big Wheel, were refurbished for the anniversary. Not everything at Six Flags closes at sunset, as it now offers glamping as its overnight attraction, starting in June.
PENNSYLVANIA
Crayola Experience
30 Centre Square Circle, Easton
www.crayolaexperience.com/easton
Many visitors to the hometown of Crayola are surprised to learn that this interactive children’s museum has branches in Minneapolis, Orlando, Plano, and Chandler, Arizona, but it is in the Lehigh Valley where the world’s most famous crayon manufacturer had its beginnings. Facing this museum is a traffic circle with monuments honoring Easton’s Civil War veterans and signs explaining the town’s long history. Four blocks to the west of this circle is the historic Northampton Street Bridge, with its views of the Delaware River.
National Museum of Industrial History
602 E 2nd Street, Bethlehem
If you’re visiting the Crayola Experience in Easton, a 20-minute drive to the west is Bethlehem, which used to be the country’s leading steelmaking city. The factory closed in 1995, with its smokestacks standing as a historical monument. The Electric Repair Shop of the Bethlehem Steel complex received a new purpose as a museum of industry. Walk past the cogs, looms, and pistons from the factory’s heyday, and be sure to speak to the staff, some of whom worked in the steel mill before it became a museum.
Hersheypark
100 Hershey Drive, Hershey, PA
Since 1906, this 121-acre theme park has been a leading attraction in Pennsylvania, where the beloved chocolatier offers a factory tour, water park, zoo, and roller coasters. Most Jolly Ranchers candies are not kosher, unless they have a hechsher, but the 105-foot-high Jolly Rancher Remix coaster offers colorful theme rides based on flavors, with lights, tunnels, and music, as it flips six times on its ride. On the way to Hershey, one can drive through Philadelphia, with its Revolutionary War history and the National Museum of American Jewish History, or Easton with the Crayola factory. A short distance to the west of Hershey is Harrisburg, the capital city of Pennsylvania.
