COSTA MESA : Exhibit Helps Pupils Study Jewish Heritage

Using cardboard, shoe boxes, clay, Styrofoam, and wood, Amit Nelik’s third- and fourth-grade students at Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School have re-created their Jewish heritage.

The students made likenesses of the ancient city of Jerusalem and the new city of Jerusalem.

The old city is complete with the Zion Gate, the entrance to the Jewish quarter, and the Wailing Wall, the remaining wall of a holy temple and a place where Jews still gather to pray. The new city depicts the Knesset, which is the Israeli parliament, with the menorah in front, and the Yad Vashem, a memorial museum for Holocaust victims.

“My kids learned about the history of Jerusalem and about their heritage,” said Nelik, a Judaic and Hebrew teacher. “This way, they will remember much better than by just opening a textbook.”

This exhibit was shown to proud parents and grandparents at an open house this week at the private school for Jewish children in kindergarten through eighth grades. Students in other grades also participated in creating art that visualized their Jewish studies.

First grade students re-created life on a kibbutz, which is an agricultural settlement. Others made Jewish symbols, such as the Star of David, and the Holy Ark, in which the Torah--the five books of Moses--are placed.

Second-grader Kim Sarembock and her classmates built different parts of a synagogue from rocks, clothespins, silk flowers, wood, stones and a myriad of paper materials.

The 8-year-old said the lesson she learned was “that it’s nice to be a Jew.”

The school’s open house also featured a science fair, which gave the school’s aspiring scientists the opportunity to show off their experiments on such hypothesis of how gravity lifts items and the effect of light on plants.

Fourth-grader Elana Gelman, 9, said science is not her favorite subject. But Gelman said her science experiment on the effect exercise has on body temperature made learning fun and earned her a first-place prize.

Third-grader Avi Odenheimer, 8, who also garnered a first place, said that in concocting his experiment on how liquids behave differently, he learned that salt water has the biggest drops and olive oil the smallest drops.

Bernice Gelman, director of the school, said a hands-on active learning approach is used to educate students because “I believe they will retain more and develop a healthy curiosity toward learning.”

Gelman said the school started 15 years ago in Anaheim, but moved to the Costa Mesa location--on the campus of the Jewish Federation of Orange County--for the 1992-93 school year. Currently, the school has an enrollment of 100 students. The school offers Jewish studies and Hebrew language as well as secular studies.

Two new classrooms will be built this summer that will enable the school to accommodate 200 students in the fall, she said.

Parents said they enrolled their children in the school because they want them to learn about their Jewish past and be with youngsters with whom they have something in common.

“I want my son to feel part of the Jewish community,” said Avi’s mother, Elise Odenheimer, a member of the school’s board of directors. “Because they observe the same traditions, there’s a certain unity there and he can be part of that.”