Celebrating Yom Ha'atzmaut

During our past two weekday sessions, our Edot class celebrated Israel's 70th birthday (which Israel itself celebrated yesterday). We began the session upstairs in the Oneg Room, preparing an Israeli vegetable salad.

As usual, we began the cooking session around the demo table, where Karen demonstrated the best methods for slicing and dicing the main ingredients (English and Persian cucumbers, Roma tomatoes, scallions and red bell peppers). Notice the Israeli flags decorating the wall behind us. The Israeli vegetable salad, with its fresh vegetables diced into very small pieces which blend together in your mouth, is one of the most quintessential foods found on Israeli tables today. Many Israelis have told me that this salad represents Israeli society, in that all its immigrants from different parts of the world came to Israel with their various cultures, and blended these into a new Israeli culture.

Here are the separate ingredients, washed and ready on their cutting boards. (You can catch a little peek of a Roma tomato hiding behind the bowl.)

And once the vegetables were all sliced and diced, students were directed to bring the bowl up to the demo table, where olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper were ready to be added in.

Then the cutting, slicing and dicing began. Charlie is slicing the scallions here into the smallest pieces possible. Did you know that the word "scallion" (also known as green onion), is derived from the Israeli city of Ashkelon? Per Wikipedia:The words scallion and shallot are related and can be traced back to the Greek ασκολόνιον ('askolonion') as described by the Greek writer Theophrastus. This name, in turn, seems to originate from the name of the ancient Canaan city of Ashkelon. 

Here's Brody beginning to slice the English cucumber.

After slicing it, it was time to dice it into the smallest pieces possible. 

Karen and I are helping (I'm holding down the cutting board for Dylan as he dices the tomato, while Karen slices the scallions), since we lost several fifth grade students from all 3 tracks this week to Outdoor Ed.

Even my Tuesday T.A., Eliana, gave a helping hand.

And when all 4 vegetables at each table were sliced and diced and put into the bowl, the result was colorful and certainly mouth-watering.

Once the olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper were added in, it was time to spoon the salad into the bowl and enjoy every mouth-watering bite. In Israel, it's often served in the mornings as part of  a hearty Israeli breakfast, along with bread, cheese and yogurt and perhaps an egg. It's also eaten as a snack or as a dinner side dish. Many Israelis keep a bowl of the salad on their kitchen counters or tables, and constantly refill it as it begins to empty. 

After tefillah and hafsaka (recess), it was time to go to our Edot classroom. There, we reviewed what we had learned about the three Edot we'd studied this year, with a focus on how many members of these Edot and, in some cases like Iraq, the entire edah, made difficult journeys to the Jewish Homeland, especially during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. We also reviewed what we learned last week about the Holocaust, and how so many Jews were displaced with no home to return to after the Second World War ended.

At this point, I shared a "Heritage" video segment that described the return of Jews to Israel just prior to and after the establishment of the new State. (Unfortunately, this segment is part of the final chapter in the "Heritage" program called "Into the Future," which is not yet available on Youtube for me to share with you.) It described how Yemenite Jews were brought to Israel during the "Magic Carpet" operation between 1948-1951, how Iraqi Jews and Jews of other Arab countries were also evacuated from Arab countries at war with the new State. It introduced the "kibbutz" and the ideals of Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and the early "chalutzim" (pioneers) to work the land and bring it back to its former glory. And I played "Heritage" multimedia presentations for the students which shared the solution early Israeli educators developed for teaching Hebrew to so many immigrants (the Ulpan - immersion - technique), how children became language teachers for their parents, and finally, how the Israeli version of "Sesame Street" (Rechov Sumsum) and the Palestinian version of the same (Shara'a Simsim) worked together to create episodes featuring a 3-year old Israeli Jewish girl muppet (Dafi) and a 3-year old Palestinian girl muppet (Hannin) teaching each other their language and realizing how much more they had in common with each other culturally than they realized. (We watched the episode titled, "Felafel is the Same in any Language.")

And when I had finished the presentation, we discussed what Israel meant to those Jews returning to their homeland. I then asked the students what Israel meant to them. We talked about how we've been lucky living in a land that accepted us and allowed us to have equal rights and opportunities to become who we want to be. Most of the students thought they would never go to live in Israel, though many were excited about the chance to visit - especially those whose families are planning to travel to Israel with Rabbi Miller for their b'nai mitzvah next year.

As a final activity, each student was given a piece of white paper and a blue marker. I then began speaking only in Hebrew, giving commands to the students to draw a blue line on the top of the white paper (l'tzayer kav kachol al ha'neeyar ha'lavan l'mala), then a blue line on the bottom of the page (l'tzayer kav kachol al ha'neeyar ha'lavan l'mata), and then to draw a blue triangle in the middle of the two lines (l'tzayer m'shoolash kachol b'emtza shnei ha'kaveem), and finally to draw an upside down blue triangle on top of the first triangle (l'tzayer m'shoolash kachol ha'fooch me'al ha'm'shoolash ha'reeshon). I then held up one student's drawing and said, "Degel Kachol Lavan" (a blue white flag). This is the name of the Israeli flag - the "Kachol Lavan." (Reverting back to English, I asked the students if they knew the name of the flag of the U.S.A.. Most responded, "Stars and Stripes." Actually, it's "Old Glory.")

Then, in English, I asked the students to think carefully about our previous discussion, and to write one sentence on the flag they had just drawn which would answer the question, "What Does Israel Mean to Me?"  Below are the results:

This coming Sunday, we'll be taking a more detailed look at the history and culture of the Jews of Yemen - the fourth and final edah that we'll be studying this year.