The Author of "Dog of Knots" writes to us!

I got an e-mail from the Kathy Walden Kaplan, the author of Dog of Knots (affectionately called "The book where nothing happens" by our class) who saw our blog. I told her that our class was puzzled by the relationship between the main character in the book and an older boy, so I asked her about it. Here's her response:

Hi Amy,

We live in a strange world where kids are expected to associate only with other kids their exact age. Even having a friend a year older or a year younger doesn't happen very often. Before it was published, my manuscript was rejected many times. It was rejected because it was too pro-Israeli. It was rejected because the little girl didn't have friends her own age. It was rejected because she had a friendship with an older boy. "Very unrealistic," one editor said.

When I was nine years old, my best friend was twelve. The relationship between Mayim and Uri is based on my friendship with David who lived across the street in Sacramento. His mother loved having children in the house and that's where all the neighbor kids ended up every day after school and all day long during the summer. David was my best friend from the time I was six. He felt it was important that he should teach me everything he knew. I learned a lot about science from him. He was like an older brother to me. Then the summer I was nine he kissed me out under the tree in my front yard. I giggled.

My family moved away that fall to Salt Lake City. The year I was twelve and David was fifteen we wrote letters to each other for a year. I think he called it "going steady" and we went steady until the following year when he found a girl to really go steady with him. The year I was eighteen I moved back to Sacramento to get a job and save money for college (my folks were too poor to pay for college). The summer I was nineteen David and I dated. He was thinking about getting married, but he wasn't sure so he went off to walk the entire length of the John Muir trail (perhaps 1,200 miles) with his backpack so he could think about it. I put him on the bus with all his gear and I was pretty sure I wanted to go to college. Being a housewife didn't really have much appeal. I had been accepted to the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and that's where I went in the fall. When David's path through the Sierras finally reached Yosemite he met a girl named Kathy who was working there for the summer. After he finished his long walk he went back to Yosemite and married her.

And there are more stories I have of unlikely friendships: when my daughter was nine, her best friend was our 12-year old neighbor, Erika, a little girl from Brazil.

I had a friend from Salt Lake City whose name was Pandora. I met her when she was 15 and her best friend was the nine-year-old boy who lived next door. They did everything together--homework, going to the library. They even wrote stories and plays together. They thought that the people who thought it was strange they should be friends were simply deprived.

Kathy

Thanks, of course, to all of you for the beautiful poster. Not only is it lovely, but the fact that you got together to make it is very touching.

Amy

Arab and Jew

During the last 2 weeks of school we'll be watching excerpts from the documentary "Arab and Jew: Wonded Spirits in a Promised Land," based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name by David Shipler. Here's how the NY Times described the film:

The history of the encounters between Arabs and Jews is told largely by the people who lived and fought and continue to fight them: from the early Zionist settlements to Israel's war of independence in 1948 and the wars that followed, up to today's ''intifada,'' the uprising in the occupied territories. There are some recollections of neighborliness before 1948, but the most deeply felt memories are of atrocities, by Arabs against Jewish settlers in the 1930's, by Jewish guerrila bands against Arab villages in 1948, by Arab states and terrorists against Israelis in the decades since, by Jewish soldiers against young stone throwers in the areas occupied by Israel after the 1967 war.

The most thoughtful comments come from journalists on both sides, who, though opposing one another's claims, acknowledge the feelings of their adversaries. An Arab attributes to Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, the observation that the conflict between Arabs and Jews is ''a fight between two rights.'' Referring to the mutual recriminations over the 1967 war, he says, ''I'm wise enough to know that in war, people do not exchange flowers.''

A Jewish journalist speaks with painful understanding of the Arab view of Jews as occupiers of ancestral Arab lands. The daily humiliations of the prolonged occupation are captured in scenes of roadblocks and official harrassment. As the program makes clear, however, the nature of the occupation cannot be understood without taking into account the years of attacks on Jewish villages, which one Israeli says, have bred ''fear and hardness.''

Turning to the situation within Israel itself, Mr. Shipler reports that Israeli Arabs, while possessing the rights of citizenship and doing better than those outside the country, remain an underclass. The most sympathetic witness here is a young Israeli Arab social worker who met hostility when she sought to move into largely Jewish upper Nazareth. A Jewish schoolteacher, a leader in the effort to keep Arabs out, says, ''They are our enemies.''

The abiding significance of the land to both sides is made powerfully clear. The two peoples, Mr. Shipler says, share ''the ideology of return.'' A Jewish settler on the West Bank, who holds that the territory was promised to the Jews by God, says, ''The Jew has to worry about the Jew.'' A West Bank Arab youth tells of throwing Molotov cocktails: ''My hatred has no limit.'' The attacks, he says, will end ''when Israel ends.''

A major theme here is the harshening effects on the young of years of occupation, terrorism and confrontation. Arab and Jewish parents alike see their children, whether they are among the stone throwers or the soldiers, as being at risk. A breath of hope is offered by efforts within Israel to bring Jewish and Arab boys and girls together and to remove discriminatory material from school curriculums. But, as Mr. Shipler says, such moves are ''fragile and vulnerable.''

How great was that?

What a lovely Sunday picnic! I'm so glad most of you could make it. Thanks to everyone for pitching in with such delicious food.

Here's a link to an explanation of Lag B'Omer.

Here's a link to my new website, currently a work-in-progress. I'd love feedback and suggestions.

War

We've been talking a lot about war over the last week. We've been studying two major conflicts in Israel's history - 1948 and 1967. We've talked about the causes, the losses and identified the resulting territorial changes. Some complex and troubling issues have come up - the Arab boycott of Israel, the Palestinian refugee problem, the Deir Yassin massacre, and the inevitable casualties of any battle. We're also finishing up a historical fiction read-aloud, Dog of Knots, which takes place during the Yom Kippur War. It relates the personal experience of one young Israeli girl, whose father was killed in the 1967 war, during the time of an attack on her country. The students have asked some great questions and made some very sophisticated observations. I'm trying to be as unbiased as possible in teaching these historical events, though I probably end up incorporating a progressive-Zionist slant. Know that I'm working hard to make sure that students gain multiple perspectives on this conflict, and I encourage you to continue these conversations at home, sharing your own views with your child.

On Thursday we'll be talking about the changes to Israel after the 1967 war with a lesson focusing specifically on the West Bank. I'll report back-

Partition Plan

Today we watched footage of the historic 1947 UN vote to approve the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. We then examined a map of the Partition Plan, which divided the country into a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state. We discussed why (or why not) a Zionist might have accepted the plan, and why (or why not) an Arab might have accepted the plan.

On Thursday we'll have a belated Yom Ha'Atzmaut celebration in school, with Israeli dance, music and food.

Exciting News!

My publisher just informed me that Scholastic and PJ Library have each ordered 2,000 copies of my forthcoming children's book. YAY!

An E-mail from Israel. For us!

On Thursday, the class generated a list of questions for David Factor, a member of Kibbutz Ketura who e-mailed us after stumbling on the blog (you can see his comment on the last post.) Here are the questions and his answers:

Answers to your Questions

Do people have shared last names or their own family names?

Although sharing is an important part of our everyday life on our Kibbutz, people have their own last names, passed on to them from their parents. Some people on the kibbutz have hebraicized their last names (changed them to Hebrew). For example, my friend Shimon changed his name last name from Roth to Ben Yosef. This can make people feel more connected to living in Israel, and it’s an old custom. For example, do you know these names: David Green, Simon Persky or Golda Mabovitz? Meet David Ben Gurion, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir.

What happens if somebody is born on kibbutz and decides s/he doesn't like living on kibbutz and wants to leave, or wants to go to a different school?

A member of the kibbutz (an adult who is “voted in” as a member by a two thirds vote of the other members of the kibbutz after living here as a candidate for a year and a half) who chooses to leave the kibbutz is entitled to “d’mei azeivah” (literally: leaving fees) , the amount of which depends on how long s/he has been a member. We don’t force people to stay. Some of the children who have grown up here no longer live here – maybe some of them will come back when they settle down and start having kids themselves. Some of our kids have attended different elementary or high schools in the area because of their special needs or interests or because of personal reasons. This is viewed as an exception, but it definitely doesn’t mean that the child or the child’s family would have to leave the kibbutz. One of our kids is attending a boarding school near Haifa, and several of our kids have studied in America for a year or a semester, either with or without their families.

If a member joins the kibbutz as an adult, and then leaves, do they get their money back?

First of all, all members who join a kibbutz are adults – you can’t become a member of Ketura or any other kibbutz until you are at least 18. On Ketura, new members do not have to hand over all of their worldly goods to the kibbutz, but they are asked to commit to not spending any of it in a way which would create a lack of equality within the kibbutz.

This is an example of how kibbutz is a society which is based on trust.

If you steal from the kibbutz or commit any crime, do you go to jail on the kibbutz?

Kibbutzim are part of Israel and are subject to the laws of the State. We don’t have a jail or a police force on Ketura. Crime is pretty rare here, but any instance of it would be handled by the Israeli police.

One more note about crime and punishment: no one can really make anyone do anything here – the society is built on the assumption that people care about the community and what people think about them, want to contribute to it, are willing to work hard and are ready to compromise in order to find solutions to problems which arise. This might sound a little idealistic, but kibbutz is a pretty idealistic place. This also might explain why not a lot of people choose to live on kibbutz- only 1.8% of Israel’s current population lives on a kibbutz!

Do you get to choose your own job?

Basically yes. We know that work is very important, and that it would be hard to keep someone happy here if they didn’t like what they did every day. But members must also be ready to consider the needs of the kibbutz. When a new member comes to our kibbutz, s/he has the chance to experiment and “window shop” before choosing a work branch, and members are free to change their jobs, although the tendency now is to adopt one steady job as a profession after a while.

Can you do one day on one job, and one day on a different job?

No society would be able to function this way. We wake up in the morning and go to our regular jobs, just like your parents. But each kibbutz member has more than one job- we all perform various community chores in addition to our regular work hours, for example: guard duty, driving people back and forth to different events and activities in the late afternoon and evening (sort of like being a taxi driver for a week), serving dinner in our dining room, milk the cows at night or early in the morning, etc. So work on kibbutz definitely gives one some variety.

Is there a University on the kibbutz?

There is no university on the kibbutz. The nearest one is in Beer Sheva (Ben Gurion U.), a 2 ½ hour drive away, and a college recently opened up in Eilat. Our kids are entitled to study for a first and second degree at the expense of the kibbutz. They study in schools and universities all over the country.

We do, however, have a university-level educational program on the kibbutz: the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies, or AIES, ( http://www.arava.org/new/ ) which offers studies on the BA or MA level. There are 40 students this semester – Israeli Arabs and Jews, Jordanians, Palestinians and Jews and non-Jews from abroad. So we have a little island of peace and co-existance here on Ketura.

Are there kibbutz laws? If you don't follow the laws, what happens?

There are many regulations in our community. They are passed by the Asefa, the general assembly of the kibbutz, which consists of all the members – each member has one vote. These rules are known to all members and we are expected to follow them, except that, as I mentioned before, we have no law enforcement here, and assume that people will be willing to live according to the rules, either because they agree with them or at least accept them. A violent act or refusing to work for a prolonged period of time without a valid excuse could leave someone liable to having them membership revoked by the Asefa, but this would be a very radical step.

How many adults and kids live on an average kibbutz? What about on Ketura?

Ketura has about 500 residents – 140 members, 190 children and 150 temporary residents (students who come here to study, volunteers, parents of members, candidates for membership, guests, some hired workers and some people who rent their houses from the kibbutz). This considered small to medium size for a kibbutz (out of the 275 kibbutzim in Israel). Ketura is the second-largest kibbutz in this part of the country, but keep in mind that the southern Negev is the least populous part of the country (only 24 people per square mile!).

What do people do for fun on the kibbutz?

On the kibbutz, people play sports (jogging, swimming, horseback riding –we have a stable- bike riding, basketball, soccer, tennis and even baseball), hike, read, watch TV, surf the internet, indulge in hobbies, etc. Eilat is a 35 minute ride away, so people eat out, snorkel, go to plays, concerts and movies. We have a regional cultural center nearby, sort of like a JCC where there are many extracurricular activities for children and adults, in addition to occasional performances and movies. We also travel- either together with our families or with our friends. The kibbutz even takes Kibbutz trips together. Just last month we all went to Istanbul, Turkey together for four days.

Are kibbutzim very hi-tec?

All of our work branches rely on computers, and some (our algae factory, for example) are very sophisticated. The entire kibbutz is wired with fiber optic cable. We all have computers in out homes, and internet access is free. Many of us have DVD players and nearly everyone has a VCR. No TIVO yet, though. We have about 40 TV channels which we get from a cable TV provider.

Do you have cars if you want to leave the kibbutz?

Yes. Cars on our kibbutz are communal property – we own them and use them together. If I want a car I fill out a short form describing when I want to use one, for how long and what sort of car I want. The car coordinator makes up a car schedule and posts it near the kibbutz office. I consult the schedule to see what car I have received, take the key to the car from the car key box and start the car by swiping my kibbutz car card through a swiper which is installed in every kibbutz car. This identifies me to the car and records my mileage and kilometrage. I am charged a small percentage and the kibbutz pays for the rest.

If I want or need to use a car at the last minute I go to the ride board to see if there is a car available or if someone has canceled a trip. Then I call (we all have cell phones) the other people on the list to see if they are still using their cars, or at least to see if I can get a lift with them. There are also busses which either stop inside the kibbutz or out on the road.

Are there sports teams on the kibbutz? Are their kid-teams that compete against each other?

On Ketura we have a big soccer tournament once a year and every kibbutz in the region participates, sending three teams (children, teens and adults) to compete against each other. The school has a basketball team that competes nationwide, and we have just started a soccer league among the kibbutzim. There are also judo and tennis tournaments.

Do people of different religions live on kibbutz?

Kibbutzim are a creation of the Zionist movement and of Israel, the Jewish state, and as such are Jewish communities. Even though many of the kibbutzim are not religious communities and don’t have synagogues, the holidays and life cycle events are all celebrated, some in very beautiful, innovative and exciting ways. So the nearly all kibbutznikim are Jews. Despite this, there are non-Jews living on kibbutzim – people who married members or people who chose to live in a Jewish community even though they themselves are not Jewish. There are kibbutzim who only accept Jewish members and those who are more flexible.

Ketura has a synagogue, keeps kashrut in its public buildings and obeys the Shabbat in public buildings and spaces. It is a mixed community of observant and non-observant Jews living together, something that calls for a lot of patience, understanding and compromises. We don’t have any non Jewish members, but we do have members who are not considered Jewish by orthodox Jewish law.

Has you kibbutz ever been attacked by terrorists?

Never.

Do you have bomb shelters?

Yes, one per neighborhood, except in the newest neighborhood, where each house has a reinforced concrete room. The bomb shelters are used as offices, storage space, a music studio, computer labs, a “gymboree-like” playroom for little kids, etc.

Kibbutz Keturah

Today Kitah Hay presented the Kibbutzim they designed. I've asked everyone for homework to spend a few minutes exploring the interactive map of a real kibbutz, Kibbutz Keturah. On Thursday we'll talk about what they saw - please try to help your child complete this assignment.

Click on the map to get started-


Thanks!
Morah Amy

Kibbutzim and Counting the Homer

On Thursday we learned about the Labor Zionists, young idealistic Jews who moved to Palestine in the early 1900's and established the communal agricultural settlements known as kibbutzim. After reading about life on a kibbutz, the class was divided into three groups. Each group was asked to name and design their own kibbutz. As on a kibbutz, everyone in the group had to come to a consensus about each decision. The maps will be posted next week, after we complete the project.

On Sunday we learned about the mitzvah of Counting the Omer, ithe ritual of counting the days from Passover until Shavuot. We made a giant Omer chart for the Hebrew School which is posted on the bulletin board outside our classroom. We'll count together each time we meet for Hebrew school and learn more about the traditions associated with this period of time. The first night of the Omer is counted at the second seder. The blessing can be found in most haggadot in the last section - Nirtzah.

Make sure to check out the website Counting the Homer if you are a Simpsons fan.

Chag Sameach V'Chasher-
Morah Amy

What's new.....

Sunday morning we hosted the fourth grade for Tefillah in our classroom so they could see how the "big kids" do it. Each fifth grader sat next to a fourth grader and helped him/her follow along in the prayer book. Our class set a beautiful example - I was very proud of them.

As we continue to study the birth of modern zionism, we learned about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the re-birth of the Hebrew language last Thursday. We watched more of Pillar of Fire, and saw an interview with Ben-Yehuda's daughter describing what it was like to be some of the only children in the whole world who spoke Hebrew. Their father bought them a male dog and a female cat for the sole purpose of being able practice conjugating verbs in both masculine and feminine!

Yesterday we learned about the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britian's statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We looked at four versions of the paper, including the final draft, which reads:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country". Click on the image above to see a copy of each of the drafts.

The class identified differences between earlier drafts and the final text. They noted that each draft gave less influence to the Zionist movement, and was increasingly less specific about how much land might be granted to a Jewish homeland. They also pointed out that only the final draft acknowledged the Muslims and Christians from the region, as well as the interests of world Jewry.

Chag Sameach v'chasher-

Morah Amy

Herzl joins us for a visit

Theodor Herzl joined us on Tuesday for a surprise visit. He told us about his experiences with anti-semitism as a journalist in France and Austria and role in the birth of the modern Zionist movement. Oddly, his beard kept falling off.

Our class watched several excerpts from the Israeli documentary series Pillar of Fire. We viewed footage from the infamous Dreyfus affair and an interview with a delegate from the Sixth Zionist Congress, recalling the decision whether or not to accept Britian's offer of a Jewish homeland in Uganda. Lastly, students pretended they were delegates at the Congress. They wrote and delivered speeches encouraging their fellow delegates to vote either for or against creating a Jewish state in Uganda. Here are 2 of the speeches - feel free to cast your vote in the comments section of the blog!

Jennie:
I think that we should vote for the Uganda Plan. I think we should because then we can have a place of our own. I also think that we should take this offer because then we could build up a great community for us to live in. Also, if we never get to Israel/Palestine then we waited for nothing. This is a good offer but if we turn it down we might not get another offer like this.

Isaiah S:
The idea is horrible.If the Jews should have a place to live, it should be Zion - only Zion. Was Uganda the promised land? NO! More than one person was promised Zion. All the Jews were promised Israel. I say we turn it down and wait for Zion. Whatever happens we should stick together.

Morah Amy

Into the Sea

We finished our map unit on Thursday with a map-making project. Every student was given a small map of Israel with a grid drawn on it, and a larger, blank grid. They attempted to copy the small map onto the larger grid in pencil, then labeled and colored the map. The completed maps are on display on our bulletin board, while some are still works in progress.

Today we learned a new song that you may or may not want to introduce to your seder. A parody of "Under the Sea" by the band Shlock Rock, it retells the story of the Exodus to a calypso beat.
Here's a link to hear a clip and read the lyrics of Into the Sea

Amy