Between Knowing and Experiencing: Israel’s Ministry of Education Policies and Practices for Enhancing Jewish Identity in the 1950s and 1960s

ABSTRACT:The article presents the policy of Israel’s Ministry of Education and the educational theorization and implementation of fostering Jewish consciousness and identity in the (non-religious) state elementary and secondary education system in the 1950s and 1960s. The guiding educational conception addressed the relationship between knowing and experiencing, emphasizing the experiential aspect and the evocation of emotion in the learning process. Policymakers anticipated that imparting knowledge about Jewish life experientially would lead to identification and the assimilation of Jewish identity among both school pupils and the “secular” Jewish-Israeli public. Two main educational practices to achieve this were used in the state education system, reflecting the experiential and emotional aspects of learning: first, designing teaching/learning materials for teachers and students in state schools; second, sending a delegation of high school and teachers seminary students in the summer of 1966 to see the extermination camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia.