Immigration Challenges

Following a brief review of what we learned about the Jewish westward migration to date during our week day sessions, students were divided into four groups. Each group was presented with a situation faced by Jewish immigrants to the U.S. in the 1840's and 1850's, and asked to brainstorm a list of solutions. The situations were as follows: (1) You can carry only one very small bag on your trip from Europe - what will you put into it to help you maintain your Jewish traditions?  (2) What solutions might you find for maintaining your Jewish identity during the long boat trip to the United States from Europe and during the overland route to California (consider what foods Jews were allowed to eat, keeping Shabbat, etc.)?  (3) When you arrive in the United States, you don't know any English, and you have no work to earn money. What can you do to survive? and (4) There are no synagogues, rabbis, Torah scrolls, siddurim (prayer books), or Jewish calendars when you arrive in the West. How will you be able to continue to observe Jewish rituals and traditions and be certain that your children and future generations will be able to do the same?

The solutions arrived at by each group to the above questions were then shared. We created a list of solutions on the whiteboard which I copied down. These solutions have now become part of a page entitled "Leaving for California? Be Sure to Keep Your Jewish Traditions By..." which will be become part of the information packet given to the Gold Rush field trip participants.

On Sunday, I shared with the students a presentation I put together from the "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews" dvd-rom program, focusing on the mass immigration of Jews from eastern Europe to the U.S. between the 1880's and 1924 (when the U.S. closed its doors after accepting more than 25 million immigrants in that time period). It's estimated that at least 2 million Jews (and possibly as many as 3 million) entered the U.S. during that era; most of them came from eastern Europe. The presentation focused on the challenges these Jews had to face. Many imagined that they were about to enter a new "Promised Land," where the streets were paved with gold. Instead, they found themselves in crowded living conditions in tenements, and working 7 days a week, from dawn til dusk, to earn enough to put food on their tables. The presentation also included a lullabye written by the Yiddish author Shalom Aleichem, in which a Jewish mother promises her baby that life in America will be so sweet that he'll eat challah in the middle of the week, and chicken broth every day (a great treat for the poor Jews of eastern Europe!). There were also some humorous bits in the presentation about "this crazy game of baseball that even grown-ups play" and a young Jewish boy's insistence that his father study his "abc's" more diligently, to learn how to read English.

We continued our "Hebrew Through Movement" vocabulary-building sessions outdoors in the amphitheater (the weather was too nice to stay indoors!), and I set up a new bulletin board in the classroom to show off the vocabulary we've learned to date, illustrated by photos of the students themselves performing the actions. 

Finally, we all want to wish our classmate Leon "re'fua sh'leima" (complete healing). We miss him. To be sure he knows we're all thinking of him, we made a giant get-well card filled with our wishes for a speedy recovery.

Our newest classroom bulletin board - Hebrew Through Movement (Ivrit Bit'nua)

Taking turns to wish Leon a speedy recovery