Shtetl Culture

During the past two weekday sessions, I reviewed what we had learned to date about the earliest history of Christianity and the Ashkenazeem (described in my last post), including how most Jews migrated to eastern Europe following the Black Death in the mid-14th century. I then used the "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews" program (an amazing program with so much interactive information on it!) to introduce the students to the origins and structure of the Yiddish language (a multimedia part of the program, which unfortunately I am unable to copy onto the post). Part of the multimedia program gave us a chance to listen to Yiddish words being used in the context of sentences on the program, and to learn to pronounce the words and sentences. We learned that Yiddish is a fusion language made up of words borrowed from Hebrew, Romance languages (old French and old Italian from the 9th century), German grammar and vocabulary from the 9th century, and Slavic languages (added to the language after the migration to eastern Europe).

We then viewed three video segments from the "Heritage" program. The first described how the Pale of Jewish Settlement (minutes 18:02-25:47) was established in the early part of the 18th century, when Tzarina Catherine the Great conquered a huge swath of Polish territory and, for the first time in Russian history, had to deal with Jews - over 2 million of them. To protect her Russian merchants from having to compete with Jewish merchants, she ordered all Jews to live within the Pale. The segment goes on to describe attempts by Nicholas I to assimilate Jews by drafting them as young boys into the army and forcing them to convert to Christianity, and then describes the shtetl culture that arose within the  Pale (and again I used a multimedia part of the Heritage program to share details about the dress, wooden synagogues, klezmer music, food, art and storytelling aspects of the culture).

The second video segment described the origin and growth of the Hassidic Jews (minutes 42:30-45:50) throughout eastern Europe. And we ended the lesson, after I shared how this rich Yiddish culture was brought to the United States by the almost 3 million Jews who emigrated from Russia between 1880-1924, fleeing pogroms and searching for religious freedom and economic security, by viewing the third "Heritage" segment about the Yiddish Theater (minutes 36:05-38:00) that arose on Second Avenue in the Lower East Side of New York.

This coming Sunday, I'll be starting to read a new novel to the students (we just completed reading "Out of Many Waters" on Tuesday and Wednesday), called "The Circlemaker" by Maxine Schur. Its subject is precisely what we just learned about - the efforts of Czar Nicholas I to assimilate Jews into Russian Christian society by drafting all Jewish boys aged 12-25, for a 25-year term of service in his army. The novel covers not only the history of the era, but shares much of the shtetl culture, including the Yiddish language. I'll be reading the story out loud to the students until the end of the school year.

I hope you can join us at our Klezmer concert this coming Sunday. All our 5th/6th grade tracks will be gathering in the Beit Knesset to hear a local klezmer musician, David Rosenfeld,  perform the music on his "klez-violin" and mandolin. Parents are invited to join us. He'll be performing from 9:25-10:25 during the first session, and from 11:05-12:05 during second session.