An Immersive, Experiential Journey to Israel

A GROUP OF Bialik faculty and administrators immersed in an exciting new PD program last spring — Interfaces: The Israel-Peoplehood Curriculum Project, organized and supported by UJA of Greater Toronto’s Israel Engagement.

Program participants were looking at ways to provide students with an engaging learning experience that gives a nuanced, realistic, contemporary view of modern Israel. Their learning sessions included theoretical work and group processing, with the highlight being a week of learning in Israel in May, 2022.

Adi Barel rated the trip to Israel as “spectacular in planning and execution,” including joint PD sessions with teachers at the Israeli High School in Eilat. “The spark in the eye of a teacher who has actually been there is irreplaceable.”

Grade 8 teacher, Lenore Lanel, who took part in the program, notes: “Everyone at the school in Israel was very welcoming and the teachers we met were curious about us. We found that as educators, we deal with similar concerns, frustrations and pedagogical issues.”

Israelis are no more homogeneous than Canadian Jews, she observes. “Israel is so vibrant and alive, with serious ongoing security issues, a wide variety of religious denominations, inter-societal issues, and divergent political beliefs. It’s a dynamic, evolving identity, not what the Diaspora society grew up thinking it was. ”

The braided streams of Israeli identity all bring their own narratives: Sephardic Jews, with the legacy of the Spanish Inquisition; Ethiopian culture; Russian and Ukrainian immigrants; Palestinians. “Canadian schools’ emphasis on teaching Israeli history and values,” says Lenore,

“has mainly centred on Eastern European Jews.” Moving forward, Bialik will work to widen that lens.

The trip reinforced for all participants the power and importance of narratives in teaching. To learn deeply and authentically, students need to experience with all their senses. While the goal is for them to love Israel and feel deeply connected to it, today’s students also need to understand Israel’s complexities and even its contradictions.

Says Lenore: “We spend a lot of time pondering how to celebrate and enact our Jewish identity in Canada. The Jewish value of knowing history, preserving, and celebrating it is much more deliberate in Canada. In Israel it is built in — a given.”

Israel is a start-up nation, with history in every corner and ongoing struggles around safety and defence. To view, in-person, the border between Sderot and Gaza provides a visceral experience of the dangers Israelis face every day.