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My daughter was on the trip to Poland described by Shalom Berger, and I
think the Sefer Torah experience was the most stirring and evocative one
of the entire trip for most of the students. The "chance" nature of the
encounter, the good fortune of having a Polish-speaking parent on board,
the fact that the man was a pig-farmer, the fact that one student happened
to have had the bottle of wine she had been asked to bring for Pesach,
which the man required as part of the sale--all of these elements
contributed to a tremendous sense of Hashgacha that the students felt at
that moment. Many kids felt that the experience was transformative. And,
of course, it was a positive experience, wrenched from the jaws of
destruction, in the least likely place on earth.
I agree that not all students can handle the enormity of what they are
encountering on these visits, and there is something about the unrelieved
exposure to more and more monuments to death and desolation that can
deaden their responses altogether. Discovery days like these can help them
to think about things from a smaller, more personal, and thus more
accessible perspective.
In a similar vein, from what I can gather, there was also some feeling
that the days and nights were so crammed with activities--including group
activities designed to help kids process what they had seen and felt--
that there wasn't enough plain old "down-time", in which they could be
alone with their thoughts and feelings and try to make some sense of them.
Not everything can be put into words right away--verbally or on paper--,
and I'm wondering whether it might not be too much to expect kids to
handle so much in so short a time. Is this "crammed" feeling created with
the educational purpose of evoking a sense of the enormity of what
happened and creating a feeling of stress and strain? If so, is that
achieved at the expense of a deeper and more thorough integration of the
horrors of the Shoah which might be possible if there were
(quantitatively) less to absorb?
I'm raising these questions because I believe that the "success" of these
trips, which are now such an important and valuable part of our
children's education, depends largely on how on how fully kids can
process what they see.
Giti Bendheim</HTML>
