You don’t need to be a rock to be a geologist. Do you need to be Jewish to be a Jewish educator?
In my world as the head of a Bay Area Jewish day school, those who are professionally involved in Jewish education largely identify, even if marginally, as Jewish. Yet the majority of Jewish educators I encountered this summer in Poland, often in leadership positions in Jewish institutions, were not Jewish.
I hesitated last spring when I was invited to participate in a working seminar in Warsaw at Polin, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. I associated Poland with death and destruction, the place where a vibrant culture dating from the Middle Ages was erased. Why would I want to visit?
Ultimately, I accepted the offer and spent two transformative weeks in Krakow, Warsaw and Lublin with 18 other educators from North America and Europe. That experience, especially the week we spent studying at the museum, challenged my assumptions about Poland and, above all, about who is a Jewish educator.
Only six of the 18 educators in the seminar were Jewish. Some were Jewish history teachers in Poland, in other Eastern European countries and in the United States. Others worked in museum education. I was curious about their motivations.
Consider Andrzej, a teacher about 50 years old from the Polish village of Skulsk. He has a master’s degree in Russian language, a second master’s degree in applied linguistics and a bachelor’s degree in English. One evening at dinner, I noticed his wedding band inscribed in Hebrew. I asked him if he had picked that up in Israel.
He smiled in his very sweet, contemplative way and switched from English to perfect Hebrew, saying he had it made in Poland. I asked how he learned Hebrew. He said, “I study and teach European history. No one can really understand European history without understanding Jewish history. I knew that in order to understand this, I needed to be able to read firsthand accounts in Hebrew and in Yiddish, so I taught myself both.”
Andrezj represents one perspective that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the designer of the museum’s core exhibit, described to us. History is relational. Poles understand that the Warsaw museum is about Polish history, and Polish history includes an intertwined relationship to Polish Jewry. You can’t understand one without understanding the other.
For this educator, his identity appears to be linked to Jewish identity. Additionally, Andrezj uses his Hebrew not only to understand the history that he studies and teaches, but also to affect the future. He is very actively engaged in fostering encounters between his Polish students and Israeli students in one of the many partnerships between Israeli and Polish schools. He is interested in Judaism and Jewish art and is writing his doctoral thesis on anti-Semitism in Europe.
I gained more insight on a bus ride with another seminar participant, a young woman named Karolina, who founded and directs the Brama Cukermana Foundation in the Polish city of Bedzin, a town that was half Jewish before World War II.
When I asked Karolina why she was involved in Jewish education, she answered, “You know what a Shabbos goy is, don’t you?” I first thought her answer meant that her parents served that function for many of their Jewish neighbors who are no longer alive. I thought that she was suggesting some sort of assuaging of guilt for the Jews who no longer lived among them.
But I learned that “Shabbos goy” has another meaning among contemporary Poles engaged in Jewish endeavors: It means supporting and assisting Jews in regenerating their community. For Karolina, part of her work is linked to memorializing what was and assisting the renaissance of Jewish life in Poland.
Over the course of my stay in Poland, I met tour guides, museum educators, teachers and volunteers working at the JCCs in Krakow and in Warsaw who were not Jewish, and who were involved in Jewish education. Many had engaged in graduate work in Jewish studies at the University of Warsaw or at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Some found out as adults that they had Jewish roots and they wanted to reclaim that heritage.
Were they Jewish educators, or did they just happen to be teaching Jewish studies or reclaiming Jewish history? If their identities are tied to these endeavors and if they are committed to enabling Jewish life to grow, are they really so different from the Jewish educators that populate our schools in the United States?
Barbara Gereboff is head of school at the Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City. The seminar in Poland was supported by philanthropist Phyllis Cook.