7th Grade Judaics Blog

The class began their unit on life in a shtetl, the Eastern European villages populated by so many of our ancestors. They saw some pictures and the beginning of the film, Fiddler on the Roof and a wedding seen from The Devil’s Arithmetic to give them some background. That background will come in handy, because the class will soon enter into a role-playing experience where they will create their own shtetl (so to speak). They chose a classmate to be the rabbi and another to be the shadchan (matchmaker) and decide who will bring the various items needed for the kind of traditional wedding that would have taken place one hundred years ago in a small eastern European Jewish town. A symbolic seudat mitzvah (festive meal—but in our case, just snacks) may take place, as well, as long as the town members bring something! There will be at least two surprises: no one knows who the bride and groom will be—not even the bride and groom!

It will take a few weeks of preparation and learning about their communities to successfully accomplish such an event. Many of the students have a head start, because some are already somewhat familiar with the language everyone spoke in the shtetl, Yiddish: the unique brand of old German, which evolved in its own way in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Some of the 7th graders knew more Yiddish than they thought!