The summer semester, the time when students from our Master's degree program come to study for two intensive weeks at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is a unique opportunity for them to see each other live and for the first time. Returning to physical classrooms, visiting the campus of the university and other educational institutions in Israel, and meeting their professors in person, all indicate the end of a stage and an opening up to new opportunities and challenges.
After many months of anticipation, at the beginning of July the students arrived at the campus on Mount Scopus. During their stay, they had lectures on Talmudic and other rabbinic literature; modern Israeli literature; teaching of the Holocaust; practice and theory in educational innovation; and acceleration of entrepreneurship. In addition, they visited Mount Herzl, enjoyed an educational clown workshop, and visited Agnon's house, the Museum of the Seam (a socio-political contemporary art museum), and the ANU Museum of the Jewish People (formerly the Museum of the Diaspora). Both groups - the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking students, and the English-speaking students - toured Jerusalem and visited the Shalva National Center, which works towards the social integration of people with disabilities, providing care and promoting inclusion. In the students' words, Shalva "inspires us to do more to raise awareness, to work on the emotional dimension, and to put the values of the Prophets into practice", because "education through empathy, love, and passion makes a difference when you have a vision and you commit to it.
Below are some of the students’ stories and insights from this semester.
“I am like a shlicha without a return date”
Ophira Melnick, originally from Jerusalem, studied history and geography at this same university years ago and dedicates her life to teaching Hebrew and Judaic Studies in the United States. This was the first time she had participated in the two-week intensive format. She currently resides in Saint Louis, Missouri, where she teaches Hebrew to high school students and where she recently opened an Ulpan for adults. “I feel like I can teach Hebrew and thus influence and change people's lives; that is my mission,” she explains. Ophira studied to be a Hebrew teacher because she wanted to work with people from all over the world. She was a counselor and a coordinator in a youth movement, and today she continues to be very active in her community: she organizes activities and is a coordinator of programs on Jewish identity and on Israel. But her biggest project is the Ulpan, which today has four different levels, and even "a group in which all the participants are grandparents of grandchildren who live here in Israel; they want to be able to communicate with them," she says.
In our conversation, during a break from classes, Ophira told us about her enthusiasm not only at returning to the university where she studied years ago but now also to personally meet her classmates. “It was very exciting to see each other for the first time, to all sit in a classroom after the whole year and learn together, because even though we know each other, we hadn't had the opportunity to actually meet.” As for the Melton Master’s degree, Ophira said that it was not something that she had planned to study; she simply happened to come across it. “I found this on Facebook on the eve of Yom Kippur, and I said, 'Maybe it's for me.’ I am very happy, especially with having chosen the innovation and entrepreneurship track, a totally new field of knowledge for me. My children encouraged me to join; I was hesitant at first”.
When asked about her discoveries and insights throughout the Master's degree program, Ophira highlights that she was surprised by the deep relationship that exists between educational innovation and business innovation. “Jewish education in the Diaspora is not something that people run out to look for, it isn’t something that generates interest in itself; rather, you have to know how to sell it. And for that we need to draw ideas from the business world,” she explained. In addition, she recalled a phrase that encapsulates some of the challenges facing Jewish educators: “We went from being the Chosen People to being the people who choose. And it is not guaranteed that we will choose a Jewish education. That's why we have a problem, and that's why this course exists."
“I feel heterotopia studying Israel from my place of origin”
Monica Amkie Jaber, from Magen David Community in Mexico, remembers her shock when she learned about the history of the Holocaust at her non-Jewish high school. She began to study Judaism from then on and later studied History, International Relations, and Zionism. “I had read Bialik and Amos Oz, and on this trip, they took us to the place where these people were inspired; that, for me, was fascinating,” says Mónica, who has taught general history and Jewish history with an international perspective, and wrote a series of books to help students make the connection between these two fields of knowledge.
In Dr. Dafna Hornike's Israeli Literature classes, the Master’s program students learned about the concept of Heterotopia, which examines cultural, institutional, and discursive spaces that are in some way disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, or transformative. For Monica, living in the Diaspora as a Jew is a heterotopia in itself. She was thus able to relate what she had learned to her own personal history. “Right at the time of the pandemic, I had a trip to Israel planned, after many years,” she says. She canceled the trip and decided to read A Story of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz. At that moment, “I felt like I could feel and smell Israel, the darkness, the streets, the symbolism,” she adds. That book was a guide to other texts of Israeli literature. "Heterotopia is frequently encountered among Jewish writers because we are a people that lives on historical memory," explained Mónica, enthusiastically returning from a visit to the house of Israeli writer Agnon, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
When she teaches classes on characters from Jewish history, her students ask her if she knew them, because of the enthusiasm she projects as a teacher. Although she started this program with such enthusiasm just in order to study in the same place as renowned Jewish writers, Monica believes that the pedagogical and leadership training she received in the program was key to her new professional role: she was recently appointed principal at the Or Hachaim school.
References:
Foucault, M. (2008). Of Other Spaces (L. De Cauter & M. Dehaene, Trans.). In M. Dehaene & L. De Cauter (Eds.), Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (pp. 13-29). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.