Teaching about Israel comes naturally for Israeli teachers for obvious reasons, but their American Jewish counterparts face distinct challenges, according to Marty Katz, president of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations and himself a Jewish educator.
And 14 visiting Israeli educators learned to appreciate and understand that during the first part of their five-day mifgash (encounter) in the United States last week.
They joined about 30 local Jewish educators on July 9 at the home of Eve Joan and Jim Zucker at a session on teaching presided over by Katz.
The discussion “really made me think about the dilemmas that [American Jewish educators] face when teaching about Israel,” said Sara Maya, an Israeli teacher from the village of Rosha Hoshaya.
The Israeli educators were in the United States July 8-12 as part of their involvement in Partnership 2000’s Education Bridge, a project that links Israeli schools and educators to their American counterparts through classroom projects and e-mail.
P2K is a Jewish Agency for Israel-United Jewish Communities project that links North American Jewish communities with regions in Israel — in this case Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Tulsa to the Sovev Kinneret in northern Israel.
Issues in teaching about Israel to diaspora Jews include use of precise terminology, which Katz illustrated. “My great grandparents were not ‘exiled’ from Russia,” said Katz, because if Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, then one can only be exiled from Israel, not Russia or elsewhere.
Participants also discussed such terms as “galut” (Hebrew for exile), “Occupied Territories” vs. “Judea and Samaria,” and others.
George Strick, who teaches at Congregations Beth Israel and Sinai, said his students have asked him, “What is a refugee camp?” “It’s not just our selection of words, but also the media’s selection of words,” he said.
The biggest concern of all was the dearth of young Jewish visitors to Israel in the last two years owing to the tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Rabbi Pinchas Avruch, executive director of the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies, said he was particularly concerned that students cannot learn about Israel sufficiently without visiting.
“When I went back last year for the first time in ten years, if felt like I had never left. You can’t develop that [feeling] unless you go,” he said.
In addition to the July 9 session, the Israelis, who stayed with host families, visited the Karl Jewish Community Campus, area synagogues, camps, museums and malls; and took a day trip to Madison.
Amotz Brontman, a teacher of film-making and television production at the Beit Yereach high school in the Jordan Valley, said, “It’s going to take me a few weeks to process this experience. I have learned so many things about what Jewish life in America means.”
“I see myself as a Jew, of course, but I always saw myself as a human being first. But [witnessing] the mutual faith I share with [American Jews], I now feel a lot stronger about being Jewish than I did before,” he said.
“This was the most meaningful thing about Partnership 2000, that each side could give something to the other side, not just from a material point of view, but also spiritual,” Brontman added.
After visiting Milwaukee, the Israelis were joined by 11 Milwaukee educators traveling to Tulsa on July 12, where they held a mifgash with Jewish educators from Minneapolis and St. Paul, and an addditional 14 Israelis. That meeting focused on evaluating and possibly expanding the Education Bridge project.
The original educator’s mifgash was held in Israel last summer and attended by five Milwaukee teachers. For more information on Education Bridge projects, visit www.yarden.ac.il/p2keb.
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