Teaching Hebrew--and Lexicons of Mideast Violence

“What is hated to yourself, do not do to your neighbor,” reads a poster on Shulamit Maor’s classroom wall, a lesson in tolerance for her young synagogue students who are struggling to learn how to read and write Hebrew and how to make sense out of the seemingly endless cycle of violence in the Middle East.

A daunting task for any teacher.

Maor, 42, born in Israel six years after nationhood, is a miniaturist in approach. When Israeli attacks against Iranian-backed guerrillas in southern Lebanon forced thousands of people to leave their homes in search of safer ground, Maor stuck a newspaper photo of young Lebanese refugees on the classroom wall.

“I asked my students to imagine what it would be like to be these children leaving these Lebanese villages. What would you take with you? Would you take a stuffed animal? Would you take a favorite book? I’m always trying to bring it down to a level they can understand. That’s the only way it can be meaningful to them.”

There is a lot to explain. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a 25-year-old Jewish law student in November, Maor tried to convey the sense of national tragedy to her elementary-school-age students.

“I told the kids that in Los Angeles, there’s a hospital named after Martin Luther King; there’s a big boulevard named after him. I told them that the place where the prime minister was assassinated has become Rabin Square; the hospital he was taken to has become Rabin Hospital. I told them every nation does this when they have a great leader and something happens.

“The younger generation in Israel was very, very shaken by this; that after learning tolerance and learning to work together, that one of their own would commit this act.”

Maor has recently returned to her introductory Hebrew classes at Congregation Shir Ha-Ma’alot in Irvine after spending three weeks in Israel.

The Irvine resident was born in the port city of Haifa in northwest Israel and moved with her family to the United States at age 17. She returned to Israel for six years when her husband was transferred there in the 1980s. Another transfer brought her back to the United States in 1988.

Her family lived away from the more dangerous border areas of the country, but she remembers her childhood as a kind of 20th century pioneer life.

“It was a new nation. Everything was new, and it was fairly primitive. We were building up the country. The roads weren’t the best, and there weren’t very many cars. There wasn’t any television. Our country was very young, and we didn’t have very much.

“In 1956 there was the Suez Canal incident. I don’t remember it myself, but there was an Egyptian ship in the Port of Haifa. I remember my father telling me that he saw the ship in the harbor that had been captured. It was very exciting for the people of Haifa to see this Egyptian ship being pulled into the port.”

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Her parents were born in Austria, where Jewish communities were close-knit.

“Before World War II, before the Holocaust, when you were Jewish you lived Judaism. Everyone knew each other, they spoke Yiddish, people knew that you didn’t drive on the Sabbath, they went to synagogue on Friday night--it was a smaller world. Here, yes, the children know they’re Jewish, but they haven’t lived it. You’ve got to teach them how to live it.”

As a teacher, Maor takes care in escorting her young students’ minds through the almost inconceivable horrors of the Holocaust.

“I try not to scare them, but for the Jewish people, we’ve always had to face evil. A lot of kids have heard of Anne Frank, but they have no clue as to what part she had in history. I tell them that this was just another little girl who just wanted to live in peace, but a cruel man came and spoiled her life.”

Her students read selections from the “Diary of Anne Frank,” then write their own diary entries, pretending to be a member of that family, living every day with the fear of being discovered.

But Maor does not have the luxury of historical perspective for many of her discussions. When two powerful Israeli shells meant for Hezbollah guerrillas missed their target April 18 and hit a United Nations compound sheltering civilians, Maor used a schoolyard analogy to try to explain the tragedy.

“I told them these Hezbollah are like gang members who are coming in and hiding behind some of the better high school children. So when something happens, when the police come and there’s a shootout, some innocent high school child who had nothing to do with the gang member is going to get shot. That’s the way I try to relate it to them.

“That’s what they’re doing. They’re turning every truck into an ambulance. When you turn every truck into an ambulance and you have Hezbollah inside, well of course, anyone could shell them and they will say, ‘Hey! You shelled an ambulance.’

“I’m not saying it’s right, but Israel wants peace and they’re just retaliating back. I was telling the kids, if on the playground somebody goes and takes your ball away, what are you going to do? You’re going to chase after them, push them down and grab the ball back. You’re going to retaliate.”

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Profile: Shulamit Maor

Age: 42

Hometown: Haifa, Israel

Residence: Irvine

Family: Married; three school-age children

Education: Bachelor’s degree in sociology from Cal State Northridge; teaching credential; studied religion at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles

Background: Taught English in Israel from 1982 to 1988; instructor of introductory Hebrew at Congregation Shir Ha-Ma’alot since 1989; special-education teaching assistant for the Irvine Unified School District

A teacher’s pride: “I’ve seen the kids I’ve had since third grade becoming bar and bat mitzvahed this year. I see that as an accomplishment because I was the one who gave them their first Hebrew training. I introduced them to all the happy events, the sad events, with my flashcards and my silly jokes and my enthusiasm. It means a lot to me.”

Source: Shulamit Maor; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times