The Joint Teachers Seminar has been a key element of the Tel Aviv-Los Angeles School Twinning Program of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles for the last 12 years. It is the only twinning activity at which all schools are represented at the same time, fostering the development of a shared language for the examination of significant Jewish themes. This year’s seminar, “From Memory to Identity: Reclaiming Jewish History in Vilnius,” takes a new direction, expanding the focus to Jewish peoplehood and expanding the geographic reach of our program to Vilnius, Lithuania. In order to broaden our understanding of the Jewish community in the Baltics, we learned about past and present Vilnius, along with educators from the Shalom Aleichem School, our new twin school. Some highlights of the itinerary included touring old Vilnius, meeting with the Jewish communities in Vilnius and Riga, seeing the Shalom Aleichem school, visiting with the elderly, restoring a Jewish cemetery, and joining the JDC summer camp for a day. The seminar served as an introduction to the theme for the entire year, informing the content of delegation itineraries and joint projects between twin schools.
What unites our lives in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv and the lives of those in Vilnius? We flew to Vilnius, Lithuania, to find out. Fifty educators from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv spent a week in Vilnius to find out what unites us and divides us, how our communities can work together for Klal Yisrael, All of Israel, and what our shared history and communal memory means for our identity as Jews.
When Simon Gurevich, the executive director of the Jewish community of Lithuania, described the Jewish summer camp (started by 10 families in Los Angeles), he might as well have been talking about Camp Ramah or JCA Shalom. He described campers singing Oseh Shalom, learning the meaning, and speaking Hebrew. The JCC in Vilnius teems with Jewish life, the Jewish school has the same posters we see at Pressman Academy, and Jewish teens walk through the streets and sit at cafes as if they were in Tel Aviv.
But what we are really coming away with is that we all face the same challenges, despite our histories and numbers. When talking about the Jewish community before the Nazi and Soviet occupations, Gurevich said that it was easier to be Jewish then; to be Jewish meant to “speak Yiddish, make gefilte fish, and go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. Today, being Jewish means going on Facebook and marking that you are Jewish.” Whether in Vilnius, Tel Aviv, or Los Angeles, we as educators are all looking to make our lessons interesting to our students so that they continue to choose being Jewish.
Bruce Raff, rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, assured Gurevich that he is not alone in his troubles. “It is no less a challenge to create meaningful, vibrant, Jewish life in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. Your challenge is our challenge. The challenge is what we can share and learn from each other.”
So that is what we continued to explore during the second half of our seminar. How do we use our shared history and communal and individual Jewish memories to strengthen the Jewish identity of our students, and how can our school twinnings utilize their communities’ experiences to teach their partners and learn from one another? What will our individual experiences teach us about Jewish life in LA, Tel Aviv, and Vilnius? As our students visit one another on delegations, they will see how their lives are different, what traditions they share, and that despite thousands of miles between them, we all come from the same people.
Gurevich conceded that Jewish life in Vilnius will never be like it was, but he has hope there will be a small Jewish community with “strong Jewish values as a living memorial to the Jews who passed away.” He said that the support of Jewish Federation Los Angeles is not just about money, but it serves as an example of Jewish values and tzedakah for Vilnius youth. And what Gurevich might not realize is that his community also serves as an example to the larger communities in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. Here is a community that is trying to open the doors to anyone who would like to connect and is finding ways to bring Judaism to a people who were never given the chance to succeed under Soviet rule. Even in communities as privileged and abundant as Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, we too can expand our vision of Jewish identity and use our memories to inform our future.
