“There was an old bubbe…who swallowed a cake,” croons 2-1/2-year-old Jacob Isaacs with excited rapidity, his childlike inflection punctuating the lyrics “old bubbe.”
“I liked the bubbe best,” he says with a giggle; his mother, Andee, seems pleased because her young boy’s enthusiasm flows from a Jewish premise.
“He has the memory of an elephant,” says Andee, laughing, and suddenly switching gears to allay the cries of 6-month-old Joshua. “He’s been asking me about that song since he first heard it last week, but I don’t remember the tune.”
Jacob, Joshua and Andee first encountered the bubbe song during Ima Avaza — or Jewish Mother Goose — a program at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills led by temple librarian Diane Rauchwerger.
Producing an eruption of laughter from both kids and parents, Rauchwerger illustrated her Jewish adaptation of the popular Mother Goose nursery rhyme by feeding a Kiddush cup, Shabbat candles, matzah ball soup — “and a cake,” reminds Jacob — to a bubbe puppet with an enormous mouth.
“They’re learning the Jewish symbols in a fun way, but they’re also learning language enrichment,” says Rauchwerger, the epitome of a Jewish Mother Goose with her blue star- and planet-covered, multipocketed apron of props and her stuffed Mother Goose sidekick.
“Children have been enjoying the Mother Goose stories for hundreds of years,” she says, “but there hasn’t been much available, on that front, Jewishly.”
Started three years ago, Ima Avaza provides a combination of rhymes, songs, finger play and stories with a Jewish twist. Much of the content, like the bubbe song, is adapted from the 18th-century secular “Mother Goose Tales,” and some is based on other children’s rhymes and stories.
Infants, ages 6 to 16 months, normally attend an earlier Friday morning session, whereas toddlers, ages 17 to 36 months, attend a later one. Both programs are sponsored by the library committee at Beth Am and continue through Dec. 16.
Rauchwerger, who also works as a children’s librarian at the Sunnyvale Public Library, derived the idea for Ima Avaza from the public library’s secular Mother Goose program.
“In the secular world, it’s important for children to hear rhymes and do finger play, ” she says. “My feeling was, why not enrich language skills and Jewish development at the same time? It’s never too early to start raising a Jewish child.”
And what’s good for Mother Goose is also good for the Beth Am gander. Parents like Andee Isaacs and Debbie La Fetra, a Sunnyvale resident, have flocked to the program, seeking both Jewish and educational values.
“It’s very important for me to get Brian up to the temple as much as possible so it’s a very comfortable place for him,” says La Fetra of her 2-year old son. “He may be too young to understand theology, but he knows it’s a place where he goes that everyone is nice to him and he plays and has a lot of fun.”
Fun seems to be the operative word for Ima Avaza, since a typical scene involves toddlers wandering around the carpeted temple chapel, dancing, singing, wiggling their fingers and making all the noise they want.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention.
One participant, for instance, was glued to an illustrated page of “It Looked Like a Challah,” Rauchwerger’s Jewish adaptation of a children’s book by Charles G. Shaw. As Rauchwerger turned in a circle to show the picture to everyone, the toddler “literally followed it all the way around.”
Others, she says, “may not appear to be listening” but go home and re-sing the songs, re-tell the stories and impatiently wait for the next Ima Avaza session.
“Here’s living proof that the session made an impression,” said Andee, three days after the first of six Ima Avaza sessions, as Jacob repeated a question posed in class by Rauchwerger: “Did you ever call your grandma bubbe?”
During the session, Andee says she happily observed Jacob contradict the “terrible twos” label by concentrating and actively participating. The same went for Joshua, who sat in on the toddler’s session with his mother and Jacob.
“Joshua was fascinated,” his mother says, “watching everything, looking and listening. He didn’t make a single peep the whole time.”
Laughing, she added: “See, the parents get something out of it, too.”