Jewish Children Research Articles

How to house a child: providing homes for Jewish children in interwar Poland

After World War I Jewish community leaders in Poland addressed the increasing number of orphans due to the war and continued violence by placing children in foster care and building orphanages run by local non-governmental organisations. The care of children in private homes was seen as the most practical solution to the crisis and a real alternative to the establishment of institutions. The records of these non-governmental organisations and the writings of Jewish community leaders reveal that the discussion regarding institutions and private care reflected a desire to provide effective and efficient services but was also a sign of the institutional immaturity of the organisations that had emerged to address the needs of children. Proponents of both institutions and private care advocated greater supervision of these services and, if not institutionalisation, more organisation of those working in child welfare and of children's lives. Believing that such supervision would make the children under their care into more productive, responsible adults, the leaders of Jewish children's aid associations in Poland viewed positively the increasing involvement of non-governmental organisations and the state in the intimate lives of families.

Divine Cruelty and Rhetorical Violence

Abstract This article examines the extent to which the divine marks the extremity of the address that compels us as subjects. If the call of the divine is what makes us subjects, then the subject's relation to the divine is by definition a relation of violence, a violence that simply is constitutive of the human predicament. After tracing out this displacement, I take up the characteristics of the human-divine relation and what that relation looks like in specifically rhetorical terms by examining Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, which illustrates the way that humans are structured by their relation to divine violence. I conclude by suggesting that paying closer attention to the human-divine relation allows us to see writing not as a refuge—a field or locus—but as a means of interrupting fields, orthodoxies, methodologies, and identities.

NCSS Notable Trade Book Lesson Plan Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto Written by Susan Goldman Rubin

This lesson uses Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto to introduce students to a true story of a Catholic, Polish social worker who saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during World War II by relocating them. Students are asked to consider Irena’s actions and her motives. Students then are introduced to the Kindertransport, a series of rescue missions of Jewish children from Nazi Germany, by reading the stories of children who were involved in the event. To help students understand the relocation of children during World War II was not an isolated incident in history, students examine the Pedro Pan Airlift of 1959-1960 in order to compare and contrast the event to the Kindertransport of World War II.

Kindergarten Study-Unit: Development and Nurturing Awareness of the Existence of the Arab ‘other’ and the Existence of the Jewish ‘other’ by Means of the Arts at the Preschool Level

In this paper, we describe an educational initiative which is a studyunit for kindergarten: “Development and nurturing awareness of the existence of the Arab ‘other’ and the existence of the Jewish ‘other’ by means of the arts at the preschool level”. The unit was written as part of my graduate studies for the M. Ed. degree at the Oranim College under the guidance of Prof. Moshe Itzhaki. It evolved from my need to affect change in matters that I am responsible for in the educational field where I work. In Israeli society, the Jewish-Arab conflict is prominent (Bar-Tal, 2007). There is discernible cultural withdrawal between Jewish society and Arab society, while the two separate education systems deepen the alienation between them from very early childhood. The lack of curricula about the “other” leaves the students in a void of ethnocentric ignorance that is filled by other entities which are supportive of the development of the conflict ethos (Yona, 2007). The proposed study unit exposes the children to the narrative of another cultural group that exists in the social reality in which they are raised. This is achieved using the arts and through intercultural meetings between Jewish children and Arab children. This initiative is implemented in my kindergarten since three years, thanks to a grant received from the Fund for Innovative Teaching and thanks to an Encouragement Award from the Oranim College. As part of the initiative children from various sectors meet together and interact in Hebrew and Arabic, learning about a different culture. This process leads to experiential and meaningful learning that has received support in both the Jewish and Arab communities.

The Jewish Children Hidden in France During the Second World War: A Retrospective Study

This retrospective study focused on the consequences of childhood traumas and mourning among Jewish children who were hidden in France during World War II. Some of these hidden children went on to create a self-help group over a half-century after the end of the war, but most have remained isolated and, in the majority of cases, have difficulties assimilating their traumatic experiences.

THE ABSENT JEWISH CHILD: PHOTOGRAPHY AND HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION IN POLAND

This article considers the representations of Holocaust in Poland by discussing the ways in which photographs of Jewish children are used in literature, film and public commemoration. It shows how a “postmemorial reading” of these images by, predominantly gentile, writers, directors and social actors might be viewed as an attempt to rhetorically fill the void left after the destruction of Poland's Jewish community and to project an image of a tolerant civic society. The article examines famous images, like the photo of the Warsaw Ghetto boy, with which this discussion begins, and lesser known pictures, such as the family photographs of Henio Żytomirski from Lublin, which are examined towards the end of this article. While looking at these images, I reflect on the interaction between the visual representations of Jewish children, the memory of the Shoah in Poland and the fashioning of Polish national identity in the wake of the accession to European Union.

Incidence and risk factors for intussusception among children in northern Israel from 1992 to 2009: a retrospective study.

BackgroundDetermining the background incidence of intussusception is important in countries implementing rotavirus immunization. Rotavirus immunization was introduced into the routine infant immunization program in Israel during late 2010. Incidence and risk factors for intussusception were examined in children aged less than five years between 1992 and 2009.MethodsData were collected from medical records of children hospitalized due to intussusception (N = 190), and from control children (N = 295), at Carmel and Hillel Yaffe hospitals in northern Israel.ResultsThe average annual incidence of intussusception in Jewish and Arab children aged less than five years was estimated at 36.1 (95% CI 17.0-76.5) vs. 23.2 per 100,000 (95% CI 9.3-57.9); for infants less than 12 months of age- 128.1 (95% CI 53.0-309.6) vs. 80.1 (95% CI 29.1-242.6) per 100,000. The risk of intussusception was higher in infants aged 3–5 months: OR 5.30 (95% CI 2.11-13.31) and 6–11 months: OR 2.53 (95% CI 1.13-5.62) when compared to infants aged less than 3 months; in those living in low vs high socioeconomic communities: OR 2.81 (95% CI 1.45-5.43), and in children with recent gastroenteritis: OR 19.90 (95% CI 2.35-168.32) vs children without recent gastroenteritis. Surgical reduction was required in 23.2%. The likelihood of surgery was significantly increased in patients presenting with bloody stool, in Arabs and those who were admitted to Hillel Yaffe Hospital.ConclusionsThe incidence of intussusception prior to universal rotavirus immunization was documented in northern Israel. Despite the lower incidence, Arab patients underwent surgery more often, suggesting delayed hospital admission of Arab as opposed to Jewish patients.

Antisemitism and Jewish Children and Youth in Australia’s Capital Territory Schools

Issues pertaining to religion and Australian schools have generated a significant amount of controversy and scholarly attention in recent years, and much of the attention in the religion and schools debate has focused on Muslim and non-religious children’s experiences (Erebus International, 2006; Halafoff, 2013). This article, by contrast, explores the manifestations of antisemitism as experienced by Jewish children and youth in Canberra schools. It considers the characteristics of antisemitism; when and why it occurs; its impact on the Jewish children and young people; and also the responses to it by them, the schools and the Jewish community. Based on focus groups with the Jewish students and their parents, the study reveals that antisemitism is common in Canberra schools, as almost all Jewish children and youth in this study have experienced it. The findings from this study suggest that there is a need for more anti-racism education. Specifically there is an urgent need for educational intervention about antisemitism, alongside education about religions and beliefs in general, to counter antisemitism more effectively and religious discrimination more broadly in Australian schools.

Enfants en temps de guerre et littératures de jeunesse: XXe–XXIe siècles (Children in times of war and youth literatures: XXth–XXIst centuries) (review)

Reviewed by: Enfants en temps de guerre et littératures de jeunesse: XXe–XXIe siècles (Children in times of war and youth literatures: XXth–XXIst centuries) Anne Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Enfants en temps de guerre et littératures de jeunesse: XXe–XXIe siècles (Children in times of war and youth literatures: XXth–XXIst centuries). Proceedings. Edited by BNF/Centre national de la littérature pour la jeunesse. Clermont-Ferrand : Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal , 2013 . This collection of essays proceeds from an October 2012 symposium held in Paris, organized by Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Centre National de la Littérature pour la Jeunesse (CILJ), Université Blaise Pascal, and Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et La Sociopoétique (CELIS). This joint event highlighted the importance of children’s literature as one site of historical and cultural inquiry. Divided into four major sections that deal with the Great War, the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), WWII, and recent conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, this event convened a myriad of participants: Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, illustrators, editors of youth literature, translators, librarians, historians, and scholars in the field of Italian, Spanish, African, British, Arabic, French, and Germanic literatures. The interdisciplinary scope of this symposium pointed to the value of representations of war from the child’s unique perspective, or “à hauteur d’enfant” (13). This key concept sets the focus on the discussion of key fictional works: autobiographical novels, picture books, illustrated magazines, documentaries, newspapers, and plays that incorporate themes once considered taboo. Part 1 gathers five essays written during WWI in Italy, Germany, and [End Page 451]France. Mariella Colin analyzes Golia’s Pentolino e la grande guerra(1915) and Visentini’s Primavera Italiche(1915), as well as such newspapers as Corriere dei Piccoliwhich profile the many images of the child as hero or heroine. Bérénice Zuno discusses the proliferation of pictures books as one kind of leisure activity for children in Germany. She shows how these works carry counter-hegemonic discourses and denounce the absurdity of the war. Hans-Heino Ewers focuses on author Hulda Micals’s use of her heroine Julchen Waldebauer to portray her own traumatic experience in Germany in the form of a fictional biography. In her essay on the series Les Livres Roses de la Guerre(1915–19), edited by Larousse, Marie Puren discusses the child as the ideal hero who sacrifices himself for France. Marion Pignot concludes, giving importance to the theme of violence as one new facet of children’s literature. Part 2 deals with the cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War that characterized major nationalistic graphic journals and literature for youth. Didier Corderot discusses the birth of one major magazine entitled Pelayos(1936) and its indoctrination of the Carlist youth. He juxtaposes it to a concurring publication named Flecha(1936), which advocated the Falangist doctrine promoted by General Franco. Marie Franco addresses issues in an autobiographical novel written during the conflict: Celia en la revolución, by Elena Fortún, became accessible to readers only in 1987, well after Franco’s death. Both the realism of the setting and the presence of a teenage female character attest to the author’s own experience of the civil war. Finally, Euriell Gobbé-Mévellec analyzes how the memory of the Spanish Civil War is recaptured in five picture books published since 2000, pointing to common aesthetic patterns in portraying the horror of this war. Part 3 presents six essays that deal with narrations of resistance during WWII. It begins with two compelling testimonies by Polish Jewish survivors and children’s authors Régine Lilensten and Isaac Millman. Sylvie Martin-Mercier looks further into these narrations of resistance and resilience in Italy with the study of Guido Petter’s Ragazzi di una banda senza nome(1972) and Nel rifugio segreto(1998). Rose-May Pham Dinh delves into recent fantasy books from England: Robert Swindell’s Blitzed(2007), narrated by the young hero George, and Michael Cronin’s Against the Day(1998). Anne Chassagnol demonstrates how a teddy bear becomes the narrative voice adopted by Alsatian writer Tomi Ungërer to depict the war. Milena Šubrtov...

The 1948 mallah of Casablanca: viewing Moroccan (trans)national sentiment through juvenile trauma

Based on an unpublished memoir about the life of a seven-year-old Moroccan Jewish child in the 1940s in the mallah (Jewish quarter) of Casablanca, this article examines the traumatic dimension of a child's memory vis-à-vis the precarious social milieu and the instability of the political street at the time. The article draws a parallel between the deterioration of the protagonist's mental and physical health during 1948 and political and social events relating to the formation of Moroccan national sentiment in Casablanca. It details the contradiction between the official narrative and the ‘homey narrative’, the impact of news and rumours about the war in Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, and how the formation of a (trans)national politico-religious sentiments among the Jews of Casablanca and Purim festivities coincided with all these events and reflected their uncertainty. The protagonist's mental ‘crisis’ is analysed through concepts used in Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of a ‘body without organs’ known as ‘BwO’, where schizophrenia is not connected to either an Oedipus complex or the libido; instead, it is related to the world's (dis)order and stems from the repressive social, political, and economic conditions of the milieu in which the ‘subject-patient’ is living.

From Jerusalem to New York: Researching Jewish Erosion and Resilience

This paper tells two stories, one of Jewish erosion and one of Jewish resilience. It weaves together a research topic, intermarriage, with the personal stories of a researcher who has conducted Jewish demographic studies in the United States and Israel. To illustrate the connectedness of the personal and the professional, a state-of-the-art research project with a longitudinal design is discussed: how the project came to life as well as its various components, purposes, methodology, and sponsors. Second, the paper delves into the personal narrative of the researcher, showing how the area of study, the assumptions, and the questions she asks reflect personal roots, and are affected by life experiences and personal aspirations. The researcher’s career has been devoted to questions of deep personal interest and relevance. The paper demonstrates how personal and professional lives have enhanced each other. The Longitudinal Study of Young Conservative Jews 1995-2003 provided a valuable opportunity to examine how young people’s perceptions evolve from their adolescence in their middle school years through high school and into young adulthood in college. A key finding was that young Conservative Jews do not in general share their parents’ anxiety about inter-religious dating. Only a small minority said they dated only Jews, but most of them remained committed to Judaism, and to marrying fellow Jews. Thus, their stories reveal both Jewish erosion and Jewish resilience. The researcher’s professional life bled over into her personal life as she experienced the challenge of raising a Jewish child who grew from an infant to a teenager over the course of the longitudinal study.

Jewish on their own terms: how intermarried couples are changing American Judaism

Over half of all American Jewish children are being raised by intermarried parents. This demographic group will have a tremendous impact on American Judaism as it is lived and practiced in the coming decades. To date, however, in both academic studies about Judaism and in the popular imagination, such children and their parents remain marginal. Jennifer A. Thompson takes a different approach. In Jewish on Their Own Terms, she tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Thompson notes that in the dominant Jewish cultural narrative, intermarriage symbolizes individualism and assimilation. Talking about intermarriage allows American Jews to discuss their anxieties about remaining distinctively Jewish despite their success in assimilating into American culture. In contrast, Thompson uses ethnography to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality. She explains how American and traditional Jewish gender roles converge to put non-Jewish women in charge of raising Jewish children. Interfaith couples are like other Americans in often harboring contradictory notions of individual autonomy, universal religious truths, and obligations to family and history. Focusing on the lived experiences of these families, Jewish on Their Own Terms provides a complex and insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing.

The Shavzin-Carsch Collection of Historic Jewish Children's Literature

The Shavzin-Carsch Collection of Cincinnati's Isaac M. Wise Temple is a special collection devoted to historically significant American Jewish children's literature. As of this writing, there are over seven hundred volumes in the collection, including early children's books published by the Jewish Publication Society, titles listed in early juvenile bibliographies of the Jewish Book Annual, and books cited in key retrospective articles on Jewish children's literature. This paper describes the collection, and relates how it came to be established, its potential uses to researchers, and future issues to be considered in its expansion.

Silence et reconnaissance sociale dans le processus de reconstruction d’anciens enfants juifs cachés

BackgroundDuring World War II, many hidden Jewish children survived the Nazi occupation by hiding under false identities, in most cases separated from their parents. After the war, these children were not considered as survivors of the Holocaust and their suffering was often not recognized. Consequently, their experiences were ignored in many narratives of the Holocaust, and this until the end of the 1980s. ObjectivesThis study aims to explain the long lasting silence of former hidden Jewish children and to understand what later made them communicate about their experiences related to World War II. MethodsWe have collected and analyzed 60 life narratives of former hidden Jewish children in order to understand this phenomenon. These people were between 65 and 78 years old when they were interviewed. ResultsWe highlight that cognitive immaturity, psychic sideration, the uncertainty of certain memories, the over-adaptation to the environment and other defensive mechanisms, as well as the absence of social acknowledgment, permit to understand this specific destiny of an early trauma. In the experience of hidden Jewish children trauma is associated with a lack of understanding and a lack of integration of traumatic events. Their young age and the fact of being considered as “lucky” in comparison to other Holocaust survivors reinforced an emotional and representative freezing in the psyche of these children and young adolescents. Psychic freezing is related to their inability to integrate their past and to share it on a collective level. Moreover, their uncertainties in regard to their childhood memories have discouraged them to speak about the past and they lacked backup from the environment to do so; a child though needs the help of an adult in order to understand traumatic events. The over-adaptation to the environment and the fact that often they continued to hide their Jewish identity in adulthood contributed to the maintenance of silence. Furthermore, the lack of social acknowledgement of their trauma and the maintenance of defensive mechanisms impeded the social sharing of their experiences. In the case of hidden children, the narration of a story – that can be told, shared and symbolized – has been impaired by these factors. ConclusionThe experience of hidden Jewish children highlights the importance of social acknowledgement as a condition for sharing traumatic memories, emotions and the recovery of frozen psychic processes. Social acknowledgement has eventually led to a personal recognition of trauma and to the construction of a collective memory. Social acknowledgment of their trauma, projective identification with their grand-children, the desire to transmit their past, aging and the concept of deferred action can explain the resurgence of childhood memories and the sharing of their experiences after decades of silence. These factors often induced a better understanding and a process of symbolization of what had happened to them. If social sharing led to a revival of trauma, it also provided collective support to elaborate the past.

Perpetuating Stereotypes: A Study of Gender, Family, and Religious Life in Jewish Children's Books

This paper examines award‐winning Jewish children's literature as a medium to explore how religiosity gets constructed differently for men and women. We analyze three decades of winners of the Sydney Taylor Jewish Book Award, a prestigious annual award given by the Association of Jewish Libraries to an outstanding Jewish children's book. We demonstrate how these award‐winning books produce and perpetuate gendered religious stereotypes that associate men with agency and women with communion. We also show how these books construct images of a “domestic Judaism” for women and a “public Judaism” for men and how women have been symbolically annihilated from the titles and central character roles in these books. Drawing on Cecilia Ridgeway's () gender‐framing perspective, we argue that the gender stereotypes evident in these books matter to society because they produce and enforce gender inequalities in religiousness.

Subjective well-being and perceptions of safety among Jewish and Arab children in Israel

As research has shown, safety is also a subjective phenomenon. Contemporary scholarship has also underscored the importance of subjective well-being among children as a vital component of overall well-being. Our paper explores the potential relationship between reported levels of safety in different settings and the subjective well-being of children. We conducted our study on 2238 children ages 10 and 12 with varying sociodemographic characteristics. Our findings support our hypothesis that safety in different settings is positively inter-correlated and that safety perceptions are positively correlated with subjective well-being. Furthermore, the correlations exist among different sociodemographic groups and in different settings.

Combatting antisemitism in the school playground: an Australian case study

ABSTRACTThe aim of Gross and Rutland's paper is to analyse the problem of antisemitic bullying in contemporary Australian state schools by investigating the case of Jewish children in those schools. The study is interdisciplinary, drawing on historical data and educational methodology, and employs a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews conducted in Sydney and Melbourne with all the major actors: students (55), teachers (10), principals (4), parents (13) and Jewish communal leaders (10). Gross and Rutland argue that classical anti-Jewish stereotypes are perpetuated in the school playground, transmitted by children from one generation to the next. This finding provides an additional perspective to the general literature, which argues that racial prejudice and stereotypes are acquired primarily through home socialization, religious institutions and the media, and neglects the role of the school playground.

Changing Epidemiology of Methylphenidate Prescriptions in the Community: A Multifactorial Model

Objective: To examine dispensing patterns of methylphenidate (MPH) to determine how socioeconomic status (SES), ethnocultural affiliation, and gender affect the medical treatment of ADHD. Method: We reviewed MPH prescription records for year 2011 of children aged 6 to 18, from regional pharmacies serving homogeneous neighborhoods. Results: MPH prescriptions showed an increase in prevalence from 4.2% to 7.5% in the years 2007 to 2011, respectively. Jewish children were four times more likely to be prescribed MPH than Arab children, with significant discrepancies along SES and gender lines (p < .001). Higher SES and male gender were associated with greater use of MPH. General pediatric prescription rates of MPH in all communities increased by 85%, compared with year 2007 statistics (p < .001). Conclusion: Prescription patterns for MPH in children reflect diagnostic patterns of ADHD that appear to be heavily influenced by additive factors of SES, cultural attitudes, and gender. Dispensing data provide valuable information for targeting underserved groups and defining potential areas of abuse.

Taking sides: Palestinian advocacy and metropolitan theatre

The political and documentary turn in Anglophone metropolitan theatre in the new millennium has generated a number of plays that address the question of Palestine. Israel/Palestine presents itself as a site in which fundamental social change is still possible, making it an especially productive setting for political theatre. This article focuses on two of the most high-profile plays of the last ten years: Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). It examines not only the controversies that each of these plays engendered, but also the ways in which they negotiate the tensions that are inherent in the very notion of advocacy in theatre, which connotes two distinct forms of address: on the one hand, the effort to generate empathy and humanitarian feeling without specifying a political commitment; on the other, the attempt to persuade a viewer to affiliate with a particular struggle or set of beliefs, and to commit herself or himself to action. The article thus seeks to bring together three areas of enquiry that have been marginalized in postcolonial studies: the question of Palestine, theatre and the role of cultural production in political movements.

The role of socio-economic and environmental characteristics in school-commuting behavior: A comparative study of Jewish and Arab children in Israel

School travel contributes to most of today's envisaged transport problems. However the literature dealing with school travel is limited. Hence, a study of school-travel patterns can generate many important insights that may impact transport-system policy and management. This paper focuses on school-commuting patterns and related perceptions of schoolchildren's parents among the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel. The study aims at understanding the commuting behavior of these children, ages 9–15. It examines the relationship between gender and socio-economic characteristics in the commuting behavior of Jewish and Arab schoolchildren. The basic hypothesis is that there are differences in school commuting patterns because of various differences between these two groups.The study is based on a questionnaire administered to 1755 students from various cities and villages in Israel and their parents. Descriptive statistic and multinomial logit model were used to study the differences in travel behavior within two population groups.The results show differences in school-travel patterns between Jewish and Arab schoolchildren. Age, gender, car availability, and parents work status were found to impact their travel behavior, including walking time to school. The differences appear in morning commuting behavior, commuting mode used by boys and by girls, and their preferred mode. For both population groups, the older the child and the fewer private automobiles in the household, the more likely it is that they will walk to school as opposed to being driven by car. Arab children with employed mothers were more likely to be driven to school than to commute by school bus or on foot, whereas no significant impact was found among the Jewish children having working mothers. In addition, the results indicated also that there are differences in parental behavioral patterns and perceptions concerning their children's mode of arriving to school, aspects that should be taken into account when dealing with planning policies which aim to increase children walking. The results of the study provide insights into policies and campaigns that may help to promote walking and bicycling and generate the development of healthier and greener travel behaviour.