Our Mission

The mission of the Chelsea Gateway Project, a community-based initiative founded by Dr. Ellen Rovner, is to create a forum for the expression of immigrant experiences by paying particular attention to Chelsea’s Jewish legacy. The Chelsea Gateway Project promotes experiential education as an avenue to community engagement and social justice. The Chelsea Gateway Project explores immigrant stories to re-examine the city’s historic past, vibrant present, and potential future as the definitive location of the immigrant experience in New England.

The Chelsea Gateway Project joins with the Jewish Chelsea Museum and the city’s educational, religious and social justice organizations projects designed to highlight the city’s immigrant pasts and rich history. With our partners, the Chelsea Gateway Project makes use of oral histories, artists’ exhibits, film, presentation of material artifacts, Chelsea Jewish Tours, community education, and food-based cultural events to engage community members and visitors with Chelsea’s immigrant past and present as a multi-cultural stronghold. Despite the challenges of poverty and discrimination, Chelsea’s immigrant groups’ aspirations, hard work, and ingenuity continue to re-shape the American story.

Chelsea Jewish Tours (CJT) grows from Ellen’s long-term passion for exploring immigrant stories to re-examine the city’s historic past and vital present. Through foot tours of downtown neighborhoods, existing, re-purposed Jewish-related structures, and present-day immigrant projects, CJT invites participants to imagine a beloved community once known as “Little Jerusalem” at the actual sites of Chelsea’s cherished Yiddish vitality.  

As the fourth generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Chelsea and a cultural anthropologist, Ellen believes that knowing and celebrating our immigrant pasts is integral to building an informed, empowered, and engaged multi-cultural society.