This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
When Greer Silberbush, 16, first signed up to be a teacher’s assistant at the religious school at Temple Shaaray Tefila, a Reform synagogue on the Upper East Side, she expected to read aloud fun stories about Jewish holidays or lead lessons on the Hebrew alphabet, all while getting community service hours.
But after war broke out in Israel following Hamas’ invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, the temple’s 33 TAs, all of whom are high school students, had to learn to navigate teaching about Israel while also confronting their own emotions regarding the conflict.
“I was really shocked to see how much the kids wanted to participate in conversations about the situation in Israel, and after Oct. 7, how much the kids themselves were inclined to be talking about it,” said Silberbush, a junior at the High School for Math, Science and Engineering in Manhattan.
The TA program has been in place for many years, and after Oct. 7, the teens’ role in the synagogue has continued to be a fundamental force in Temple Shaaray Tefila’s community, according to Sara Beth Berman, the director of youth and family education at Shaaray Tefila. Since the war began, Berman added, Temple Shaaray Tefila’s teenage TAs have played an essential role by facilitating mindful, child-appropriate discussions about Israel among curious students, helping to make the conflict feel less overwhelming for kids.
“TAs help with, and sometimes lead, educational activities. They also help the kids navigate the building, read with them, and have discussions,” Berman said. “We want the TAs to build relationships with the kids.”
As TAs, teens bridge the cultural and socio-emotional gap between teachers and the school’s 144 elementary school-aged students. Their role as the students’ confidants meant that they had to create a space where kids felt supported and could freely express their thoughts and emotions.
Silberbush initially found that her 2nd grade students “didn’t really know what the situation was about,” she said, referring to Israel’s war with Hamas. “But a lot of the adults in their lives were trying to talk about it. So it was a little bit uncomfortable.”
In particular, Silberbush remembers a student flipping through a prayer book during music class, and fixating on a map of Israel. The student “pointed to a map of Israel and said ‘Oh my dad is fighting here right now.’” The rest of the class went quiet while he asked questions about the war. “We had to explain the situation while making sure that nobody was upset and understood it clearly, because the kids are still 8 years old,” said Silberbush.
As time went on, TAs learned which approaches worked best when it came to addressing Israel in class — thanks, in part, due to their experiences learning about Israel outside of temple. As the teens gained more experience talking about the war with their classmates, teachers and friends, it became easier to address the subject comfortably with younger children at religious school.
Charlie Nosenchuk, a 17-year-old 4th grade TA and a junior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, said her experience addressing Israel in school has improved her teaching in the classroom. “As someone who has learned a lot about Oct. 7 at my own school, I think that it’s easier for me to translate that [learning] in ways that make sense for them and also makes them feel comfortable,” she said.
Nosenchuk added that, for younger students, holding conversations with TAs in particular helped them feel more at ease. “I think that for important conversations like these, when it’s with someone closer in age to you, you feel more comfortable because you’re more seen,” she said.
One important aspect of the TAs’ jobs: helping to facilitate Zoom calls between the religious school students and similarly-aged students in Israel. Designed to create a connection between Jewish children in the United States and Israel, the cross-cultural calls have been happening for years, but have become more fraught since the war began.
To prepare the students for these calls, TAs worked with students on videos sent to Israeli kids before the Zoom meetings, helping to establish relationships with the Israeli students before any conversations began. “They might be doing camera work or, they might be chatting with the younger kids, the actual students, about what they’re learning about,” said Berman.
During the calls themselves, TAs also have a network of adults in the room that they can turn to when faced with questions about Israel or Oct. 7. “Sometimes they defer to the teachers, to me or to the clergy, you know, you get a range of answers about how anybody feels about anything,” said Berman.
Another goal of these Zoom calls was to establish similarities between American and Israeli students. “The conversation about Israel is not just focused on politics,” said Alexander Mason, a 17-year-old 4th grade TA from the Bronx High School of Science. “It’s more focused on the commonalities between Jewish kids in America and Jewish kids in Israel.”
That, according to Berman, is precisely the point of the project. “By talking about their lives, the daily lives that they live, the Jewish lives that they live, they learn that they have a lot in common with these kids, even though they live halfway across the world,” she said.
Dr. Robin Gurwitch, a psychiatry and behavioral studies professor at Duke University, said highlighting these parallels between Jewish children in America and Israel is extremely important in a divided world. “It helps bring the world a little closer together, right?” she said. “And I think that’s what your school is doing to help them see that, gosh, there’s kids just like me over there. It helps us see that even though we live in different countries, we’re connected by some things that we have in common.”
According to Berman, these Zoom conversations, which occur three times a school year, have helped Shaaray Tefila students become more familiar with the war in a child-safe way.
“I don’t want to say everything’s a runaway success,” said Berman. “But I would say we would be doing a disservice to our students and their families if we did not create a space where they felt comfortable asking questions, whatever those questions are, and for us to answer in an age appropriate manner.”
Though the religious school’s curriculum continues to evolve, the TAs have learned not only to adapt to the needs of their students. They’ve also grown as mentors and learners themselves.
At her diverse Manhattan school, Silberbush said “everybody had really strong opinions” about the Israel-Hamas war, and that sometimes conversations with her peers were awkward. But they were also useful in learning how to handle difficult conversations — something that has helped her as a TA. “I was able to see many different sides of the situation and learn more from them,” she said.
“I think it [teaching] helped me become a lot more comfortable with the topic because obviously it’s very serious, and it’s not always easy to talk about things like this,” Nosenchuk said. “Bringing it [Israel] into conversation and not shying away from it made me more comfortable with it outside of school as well.”
Above all, Berman says that the teens’ role in the classroom has been invaluable. “These are kids that grew up in our program here that are now helping their peers who are just a handful of years younger than them,” she said. “It’s effective and they do a good job, which is amazing.”
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