The World program on Public Radio International runs a piece on the trip to Belarus and elsewhere in Eastern Europe organized for a small group of students by the Yiddishkayt organization in Los Angeles, via its Helix project. Reports Nina Porzucki:
Forget Lonely Planet. Forget Fodor’s. When Rob Adler Peckerar plans a trip to Eastern Europe he goes straight to one guidebook publisher, the Baedeker—the 1907 Baedeker to be exact. “You can’t beat the maps,” says Peckerar.
It doesn’t matter that the sites on the maps, written in German, are just a bit out of date. They show just what Peckerar is looking for. “It indicates the Jewish spaces [that] are still active Jewish spaces. You can look on the map and see here’s a synagogue and here’s a synagogue.”
For Peckerar, the executive director of Yiddishkayt, a non-profit Yiddish cultural organization, these guidebooks point to a past that he wants young American Jews to know.
“The past thousand years of Jewish life is what’s missing from Jewish education,” he says. “Kids don’t know about Jewish life in Europe, they learn today mostly about Israel and they learn the destruction of Jewish culture.”
Instead of visiting concentration camps and mass graves like many conventional Jewish student tours this summer, Peckerar took eight students to the hometowns of Jewish poets and novelists. This was a tour more about life than genocide.
More than anything else Peckerar wanted to take students back to the villages where their families came from sometimes hundreds of years ago. “Most Jews don’t know the name of the place where their family is from,” says Peckerar. What they know instead he says, is a vague picture of shtetl life in Eastern Europe – or a musical likeFiddler on the Roof.
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