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Mihael Malyshev (St. Petersburg)
Family education
The excursion is recommended to the parents, chiefs of the family clubs and programs, teachers of the English language at the Jewish schools.
Our today's excursion will be dedicated to English-language sites addressed to Jewish parents. Alas, they really disappointed me. But let's begin from the beginning. I will put them in the order according to their being interesting (to me, of course).
The site contains the information not just for the parents, but rather for adult Jews who haven't received adequate Jewish education but who are eager to keep Jewish homes. The topics of the site are as follows: Blessings, Kashrut, Sabbath, Kaddish and Izkor, holidays, short description of the events in the Torah (for instance, gender aspects in the Torah, wars in the Torah, etc.). The information and analysis are not too deep.
This site is dedicated to the life cycle of a Jew - from birth through death (all the rites from
brith-mila to burial). The material is presented also in a shallow way. The authors of the site belong to Progressive Judaism.
The site of the Reformed Judaism dedicated to celebration of Jewish holidays - history of each holiday, its description, tradition of celebration, recipes of feast dishes.... I should give this site a C+ on the scale of being interesting.
Also rather a family-oriented site - many recipes, many stories about holidays. One can use it, but I think shouldn't - very dull.
The site is advertised as containing specialists' advice how to bring up children so that they would like to be Jewish. In fact it is a small site, approximately 3-4 pages of text with rather a general contents with advice of also a general kind - about the importance of ethnic identity, common celebration of holidays, etc. Very dull. I wouldn't advice anybody to use it.
I expected discussions of the problems of intermarriages, which, I think, are rather urgent for the former USSR Jewish community. Alas - it appeared to be an advertising of books and CDs on these problems - and nothing more.
And two chats:
www.egroups.com/group/tisch/info.html
Forum on the questions of celebration of Sabbath, mostly containing Sabbath stories.
Forum on problems of children upbringing.
Both forums are rather badly organized; each contains a subscription.
And as we speak about family sites, let me remind the 2, which were described in our previous excursions.
The former is dedicated to theoretical and practical matters of Kashrut solely, the latter - to Kashrut, holidays, news, excursions around Jerusalem and what not! I strongly recommend the second one.
Our excursion is over. The next will be dedicated to sites dealing with Jewish life in the former socialist countries.
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