In the early 1970s, my mother sat in her 9th grade halakha class cowering in fear. Her teacher loudly berated the class as not one student volunteered to translate the words of the Rosh Hashana prayers. Her pulse racing, my mother suddenly realized she had an advantage. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors who came from two different countries, my mother’s first language was Yiddish and the mahzor she had pulled from her parents’ bookshelf the night before was a Hebrew-Yiddish one. She timidly raised her hand, provided the translation, thus saving her class from incurring further wrath from the teacher. Jewish education is unique in that each student brings their own personalized version of Judaism with them into the classroom. For my mother that day, it looked like a mahzor with a Yiddish translation.
