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Jewish Identity and Religion in the Soviet Union
In this lesson, students learn of the destruction of Jewish identity and religion in the Soviet Union from its rise until WWII.
June 10, 2018
Letter Writing Activity
Students will write a letter to a former refusenik or activist. This lesson is a culminating activity at the end of a unit, quarter, or semester. Students will have the opportunity to reflect and articulate on who inspired them personally, and ideals or actions they will incorporate into their own lives.
June 7, 2018
Music & Social Impact
Songs can provide entertainment but can also help to bring people’s attention to world problems and to inspire people to seek solutions to those problems. Songwriters often use the lyrics of songs to educate, inspire, influence and change society, and provide social commentary. In this lesson, students will discuss how music was used to inspire, motivate, or teach about the movement to free Soviet Jewry.
Image Credit: http://kosharovsky.com/
Jewish Identity
In this lesson, students will explore Jewish texts that deal with questions of identity and belonging. They will then create identity cubes, using symbols and/or imagery that represent various parts of their identities. These cubes will, in turn, help the students identify how they can each contribute to the Jewish community, uniquely.
Image Credit: http://kosharovsky.com/
Make Your Own Haggadah
One of the tenets of celebrating Passover is to pass the story from generation to generation and to internalize it as one’s own. This may seem hard to imagine, but recent Jewish history witnessed such an event: hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union left an oppressive regime with open support of the government after fighting for this right for years.
In this lesson, students will use texts to analyze different elements of the story and cultural cues to envision themselves as if “they themselves came out of Egypt.”
June 5, 2018
The Origins of the Soviet Jewish Community
In this lesson, students will learn about the origins of the Soviet Jewish community leading up to the Revolutions of 1917 and will learn about the roots of soviet anti-Semitism.
The Power of the Individual
In this lesson, students will learn about the figure of Avital Sharansky and will compare her story to the events of the Purim story.
Text Study on Jewish Activism
In this lesson, students will read key Jewish sources on political activism and will analyze the role of activism as a core Jewish value.
June 3, 2018
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