JERUSALEM — Last December, for the first time in her Israeli teaching career, Etti Serok had to decide what to do about the girls in her class who wanted to put up a Christmas tree.
Serok, a Jerusalem-based specialist in Jewish family education, created a special program for the teen girls at Ramat Hadassah-Szold, a northern Israeli youth village for immigrant and native-born Israeli teenagers from dysfunctional homes. She travels there once a week.
When she talked about holiday celebrations, a number of girls who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union said they looked forward to celebrating Christmas, as they had in the past.
“The last thing I wanted to do is to belittle their family experience by saying what they did was no good,” said Serok. “That was a classic mistake with previous waves of immigration. Instead of bashing Christmas, I wanted to show them how to celebrate Chanukah and how meaningful that can be for them.”
Serok’s program, called “Woman of Valor” was commissioned by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, after one of its leaders visited the youth village and noticed that the girls felt even more removed from Jewish tradition than their male peers. Most of the boys had bar mitzvah ceremonies in synagogues, while none of the girls had. In addition, the girls, who make up less than a third of the residents of the village, sometimes saw themselves as outsiders. They needed a boost in their self-esteem.
Nearly all public schools in Israel are divided into “religious” and “secular” categories, with only a few dozen schools trying to bridge the gap. Children in the secular schools often lose the thread of Jewish observance. Serok and her team from the Center for Jewish Family Education in Jerusalem have years of successful experience in re-introducing Judaism in Israel’s cities, where the vast majority of children live at home with their parents.
Hadassah challenged them to come up with a program that would present Judaism in a positive, non-coercive manner to children living away from home. If it could work in Ramat Hadassah, where children come from extremely deprived backgrounds, it might work in any of the 200 youth villages in Israel. Youth villages are rural residential communities that initially provided homes for teenage refugees from the Holocaust. Over the decades, they have continued to house immigrants and children from disadvantaged home environments.
In meetings with her students, Serok aims to instill a sense of pride in being a Jewish woman and to familiarize them with ceremonies and customs. “Many of the students in the youth villages come from cultural settings where women’s status is particularly low. We’re building self-esteem and inculcating Judaism without coercion.”
The theme of the lessons is “A Woman of Valor,” based on the statement in Proverbs 31 that an accomplished woman is worth more than her weight in pearls.
Serok’s approach is egalitarian, and girls learn to make the ceremonial blessings. “Some of them come from all female households and think there is a prohibition against women or girls saying the blessing over the bread or the wine,” she says.
Early classes deal with the Jewish calendar and each girl’s Hebrew birthday. Symbols like the letters on the spinning tops used for Chanukah are explained. One of the teachers brings a guitar and sets each lesson to Jewish music and song. Another, a gifted storyteller, turns coursework into enchanting tales.
Serok feels it is not necessary for her students to commit to becoming religious to acquire a knowledge and love of Jewish sources and ceremony. The students investigate Jewish women in the Bible and learn to create a family Sabbath table with all its elements, and to blow a shofar, the ram’s horn sounded on the Jewish New Year. The teachers noticed that a newly renovated classroom they were using didn’t have a mezuzah. The teens learned the ceremony for putting one on the doorpost.
The culmination of the course is a Sabbath together in Jerusalem where the focus is on the Ten Commandments and how they relate to the students’ daily lives.
With Dec. 25 fast approaching, how does Serok plan to handle Christmas?
“We’ll analyze Christmas and decide which beloved components — a festive meal, getting presents, singing — can be brought into Jewish life. We’re aiming for positive transition, not making the girls feel guilty and worsening already tentative ties with their families.”
And how do the girls feel about their new relationship to Judaism.
“I like it a lot,” said one 16-year-old who emigrated from the Soviet Union with her unemployed mother. “I never realized there were so many traditions.”