Those who grew up in the 1950s and \’60s heard little about the Holocaust. Considered a subject too frightening for children, it was seldom discussed or taught.
One Sunday morning, many years ago, as parents came to pick up their kids from the Hebrew school where I taught, I overheard a conversation. \”How was class?\” A father asked his son.The child began to whine. \”I hate Hebrew school,\” he said. \”It\’s boring and stupid, the teachers are mean, and the kids aren\’t nice. I don\’t want to go any more.\” The father stopped, turned to the kid,and said: \”Listen, when I was your age, I went to Hebrew school and I hated it. It was boring, the teachers were mean, the kids weren\’t nice, but they made me go, and, now, you\’re going to go too!\”
What a tragedy.
Thousands of Los Angeles-area youngsters participate in hands-on workshops.
It\’s only in recent decades that \”children\’smusic\” has mushroomed into a separate growth industry, complete withits own concert tours, TV tie-in shows and recognizable stars.
Los Angelesbaker Mark Stark has taken the Greatest Hits of American Jewish Cookery and put them into a format that\’s so kid friendly, readers might be tempted to color in the pictures.
\”You, Me & Dignity,\” which officially opened last week at themuseum space inside the Westside Jewish Community Center on OlympicBoulevard, is a thought-provoking, hands-on walk through the world ofdisabilities.
Rachmiel Steinberg is a \”Bostoner\” Chassid, but, he quips, he is also the Los Angeles Police Department\’s \”show-and-tell rabbi.\” That\’s because the Yavneh Hebrew Academy teacher has taken on some unusual students lately: officers of the LAPD\’s Wilshire Division.
Child rearing, it turns out, is a relatively short-term project. The truth is that we don\’t have them for very long. Eighteen years, that\’s all. Eighteen years, from birth until they move away to Stanford. If your child is 5, you\’ve got 13 years left. If your child is 8, you\’ve got 10 years. If your child is 11,you\’ve got only seven years — just a few years to put them to bed with a story and a song, to make them breakfast, to stick artwork upon the fridge.
As a writer, Frankiel is co-author of the recently published \”Minding the Temple of the Soul,\” as well as \”The Voice of Sarah,\” an elegantly written response to the notion that traditional Judaism is the sound of only men talking.
Rabbi Baruch and Michal Finkelstein are developing a sex-education curriculum for Jewish day schools.
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