‘See all the connections’: Jewish and Islamic schools in museum exchange
“Do you have to be born Jewish, or can you be converted?”
A class of year 6 students from East Preston Islamic College are sitting cross-legged on the carpet of a room inside the Jewish Museum of Australia, getting a hands-on introduction to many of the key artefacts of the Jewish faith.
Jewish Museum education programs officer Alice Freeman with students from East Preston Islamic College.Credit:Scott McNaughton
No, you don’t have to be born Jewish to practice Judaism, a museum guide explains in answer to the young boy’s question. She is not Jewish, she adds, but her husband is, and their daughters immersed themselves in a bath called a mikveh to convert to Judaism.
Another guide compares the Jewish bathing ritual to ghusl, an Islamic conversion practice involving purification in water.
Upstairs, a separate group of girls and boys are checking out the permanent exhibition and learning about Jewish customs concerning prayer, food and holidays.
The East Preston students are visiting the Jewish Museum as part of a school exchange program. Students from Bialik College in Hawthorn and Sholem Aleichem School in Elsternwick had their turn on Monday, when they toured the Islamic Museum of Australia in Thornbury.
The exchange program will conclude when students at all three schools meet for a workshop at the State Library later this month.
The program is designed to “unpack some of the stereotypes students might have, to help them understand commonalities and similarities” between Islam and Judaism, Sherene Hassan, director of education at the Islamic Museum, says.
“By immersing them in that environment, they see for themselves the many parallels that exist between the two faiths.”
The exchange program steers clear of politics and the poisoned relations between the Arab and Israeli nations.
“It’s an opportunity for us to, from a Muslim perspective, emphasise the importance of getting to know other faiths and respect other faiths,” Ms Hassan says.
Not that students don’t bowl up some curly questions of their own.
Alice Freeman, the education and programs officer at the Jewish Museum, recalls a student from a Jewish school asking Islamic students about anti-Semitism, and whether Islamic people experience similar persecution.
The question was, in its way, an attempt to draw a connection between the two faiths, something students who participate in the program are often eager to do, Ms Freeman says.
“For the most part, it’s, ‘how do you celebrate your faith?’, ‘how does prayer work?; and they love stories about festivals and so on.”
Students from East Preston Islamic College are shown a replica of the Torah inside the Jewish Museum of Australia.Credit:Scott McNaughton
In posing questions about faith to children from another religion, students also learn more about their own culture and how their own religious observances often differ from their classmates’, she says.
Wednesday’s museum visit was the first time students at East Preston Islamic College participated in the program. The school’s head of primary, Coryn Bretag, said most of her students’ understanding of Jewish people was limited to glimpses of the news and word from within their community about Israel and Palestine.
“Our children are very much in a Muslim bubble, so they don’t know a lot about other faiths,” Ms Bretag said.
“They’ve been astounded at how much is so similar, from the shape of the synagogue to the shape of the mosque with its domes, the fact they are segregated, that they don’t eat pork … so they can see all the connections and it’s been eye-opening to them.”
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