This project will be featured in conjunction with a new course being introduced at Drexel University during the winter quarter 2003, an offering both of the Judaic Studies Program and The Department of History and Politics, The Jewish Cultural Tapestry. Young adult Drexel college students who will be in the course, as their special term project, will study the ways that adults and children learn about the diversity of Jewish traditions.

The project will concentrate on two groups: sixth and seventh graders, and eighth graders together with high school students. Judaic Studies Program Director, Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz, together with the school staff, will present background information and lead discussions in the synagogue classes, on the history, geography, and folkways of different Jewish communities. Drexel’s Judaic Studies Program will make available educational films for teachers to use at Society Hill Synagogue.

Following this, four presentations will take place during school sessions, by local adult members of different Philadelphia Jewish ethnic subgroups. These presenters will appear as pairs, each pair from one family, both an elderly parent and a middle-aged child. They will focus on the meaning that continuing local family customs engenders in their life. Dr. Peltz will discuss this with them in advance and, together with the school teachers, will facilitate the discussions in which the family members address each other, in addition to the audience. The audience will consist of Drexel young adults, the Society Hill teenagers, and the Society Hill parents. At present, we plan to attract representatives of Iranian Jews, Syrian Arabic-speaking Jews, Greek and Turkish Sephardic Jews, and Polish Jews. The informants are immigrants, children of immigrants, and grandchildren of immigrants.

Although the learning sessions will allow the presenters to range widely over their background and retention of tradition, we will dwell on the individual meaning that such practice and identity impart. Because of the time of year, we will spend time on Purim and Peysakh. The facilitators and presenters will make a special effort to have the students and parents share their own ethnic practices that are especially meaningful to them.

The culmination of the study project will be a public concert of Sephardic music, held at either Drexel University or Society Hill Synagogue. The adult and children’s Shira Hadasha choirs of Congregation Beth Am Israel of Penn Valley, led by Alexander Botwinik, will present its Sephardic repertoire to the participants, as well as to the larger Philadelphia community. These choirs have a tradition of cultivating the Jewish ethnic musical repertoire. They have presented two stunning concerts of Yiddish and Sephardic music within the past two years. They serve as a model for the way that music can galvanize a synagogue community and spur it on to heights of appreciation and professional performance.

In sum, these intergenerational and multigenerational classes and folklore and music performances aim to strengthen the knowledge that the Jewish community possesses of its diverse rituals and traditions. In addition, the series will hopefully stimulate community members to increase their own adherence to Jewish folkways in their family life.