Program pairs local students with Israeli peers

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Blond-haired, blue-eyed Katie McChesney is about to appear on Israeli television. The Short Hills eighth grader is a student in Mary Vazquez’s Holocaust elective at Millburn Middle School. On May 5, Holocaust Remembrance Day, she’ll be talking with Israel children’s television network Arutz HaYeladim about her experiences being paired with students in an eighth-grade classroom at Hativat Yonaton in Ra’anana, Israel.

Such high-tech student exchanges are part of a curriculum known as the International Book-Sharing Project, which enables teens from different cultures to reach across continents to discuss assigned texts on the Holocaust. The program is coordinated by Yad Layeled, a museum dedicated to the children of the Holocaust created at the Ghetto Fighters House museum in Israel in 1995. It comprised just one part of the content of Vazquez’s class this semester, the sixth time she has taught it.

“Each time it’s a little different,” said Vazquez, whose Holocaust class created a prom for survivors last spring. Vazquez said she found out about the curriculum from Larry and Nancy Pantirer, the parents of a former student who are now sponsoring the curriculum at Millburn Middle School.

Her class communicates back and forth with Hativat Yonaton twice each week via e-mail, focusing on the large themes in the book both classes are reading, The Island on Bird Street by noted Israeli author Uri Orlev. The themes include “making moral choices when there’s a war,” said Vazquez. “Children can relate to this serious topic because the main character in the book is also a child; and they can relate to each other because they are both teens.”

The International Book-Sharing Project was conceived over a dozen years ago by Dr. Karen Shawn, a teacher at Moriah Yeshiva Middle School in Englewood. She is the educational consultant for the project. Before coming to Moriah, Shawn taught Holocaust education in English for foreign teachers at the Ghetto Fighters Museum as well as at Yad Vashem. “She started this as a snail mail project in her school, then moved to e-mail before Yad Layeled was created,” explained Linda Ripps, director of education for the International Book-Sharing Project.

Yad Layeled, now 10 years old, began sponsoring the program nine years ago. Every pair of participating schools has an American and Israeli staff person to both make field visits and ease communication, said Ripps. The project has a middle school and a high school track in which students read books by Orlev and Elie Wiesel’s Night, respectively.

Although the project began small, it is now in 41 schools. This year, 52 U.S. classrooms are participating. Six are in New Jersey, including the middle school and high school of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union, located at its West Orange Upper School Campus. In addition to McChesney, Schechter student Noah Linfield will be featured on the Israeli television broadcast Thursday.

Over the years, Ripps estimates, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 students in Israel and the United States have participated.

Vazquez’s students seemed most moved by their one-on-one interactions with Israeli kids. “I was excited. I thought it would be interesting to have a pen pal,” said Kim Atkins of Short Hills. “We talked a lot about ourselves.” Her mother, Melanie Atkins, who lived on a kibbutz when she was younger, is even more excited. “I’m thrilled. I fantasize this will kick off something where she might want to go to Israel. It’s a little more edgy now than when I went in the ’70s.”

Ethan Rosen of Short Hills thought it was “fun but strange. We don’t get to talk to kids in Israel too much.” Kyle Roth, also of Short Hills, took an interest in the different perspectives of Israeli teens. “People in Israel had different opinions. It’s different for them to read a book about the Holocaust because of the different environment they live in,” he said.

For Katie McChesney, who is not Jewish, the class is serious business. She took it to gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust because, as she said, so many of her friends are Jewish. She now believes her presence in the class, and her impending appearance on Israeli television, sends a critical message. “It’s important for them to see someone different from them saying, ‘We understand. We’re learning, we’re teaching and we understand where you’re coming from.’”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.