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How former Gray Academy instructor Avi Posen came to take a central role in offering online education for Jewish schools

AVi Posen

By BERNIE BELLAN
Elsewhere on this website we have  a story about an interesting new partner-school program developed by an organization called OpenDor Media. The name of the program is “Unpacked for Educators”. To review what was in that story – in case you didn’t see it, the aim of the program “is to strengthen Israel education in Jewish schools around the world.

“This international community will be at the forefront of digital education, working together to create a shared language for how to teach about Israel. If you’re not familiar, Unpacked for Educators, a division of OpenDor Media, is a leader in digital education and innovation for Israel and Jewish content. The educators in the program will receive complete access to OpenDor Media’s powerful and unique video content to professional development, networking and expert support.”

At the time we ran the story, however, we had no idea that one of the key individuals behind Unpacked for Educators is none other than Avi Posen, formerly an educator at Gray Academy who is now living in Israel, which is where he and his wife, Illana (Minuk), made aliyah last year.
The day after the story appeared I received a phone call from Avi, who explained his connection to Unpacked for Educators. We had run a story by Myron Love about Avi and Illana last November, in which Myron wrote that Avi was about to begin a new position as “assistant director of Education for Jerusalem U, a Jewish/Israel education digital media company based out of the old city of Jerusalem.”
During our phone call Avi asked me whether I’d be interested in finding out more about Unpacked for Educators and his role in that organization. That led to our having a lengthy Zoom call on Wednesday, August 12, in which Avi gave me a much more complete overview of what Unpacked for Educators is all about.

The Unpacked for Educators website gives this description of Avi’s background: Avi Posen is the Assistant Director of Education at OpenDor Media. His focus is on content creation and exposing Jewish educators around the world to our Unpacked for Educators materials. Avi has worked as a Judaic Studies teacher, Hillel Director and Jewish camp director. He holds a Masters in Jewish Education from Yeshiva University in New York.
We began our conversation by clarifying just who it is for whom Avi is working. As Myron noted in his story, Avi began working for something called “Jerusalem U”. In January, however, “we rebranded to ‘Open Dor Media,’” Avi explained.
“Within Open Dor Media we have different brands,” he continued. “We have our ‘Unpacked’ Youtube page, we have ‘Imagination Productions’ films, and we have ‘Unpacked for Educators’, and I’m the assistant director of education working with Unpacked for Educators.
“What we essentially do,” Avi explained, “is we take all the videos and films about the Jewish people that we produce on a weekly basis, and we create educational resources for them, and we get them out to the Jewish world.
“On a monthly basis we have thousands of Jewish educators from all over the world that utilize our resources, and we send out a weekly email breaking down Jewish current events, why it matters – from different perspectives, and how to teach about it.
“We have 2300 Jewish educators subscribing to that (service). Rabbi (Jonathan) Sacks was our 2,000th subscriber about a month ago.
“All the work that we do is free. We’re not selling it.”
Avi went on to say that it’s very easy to persuade educators to subscribe to what Unpacked for Educators offers because “not only is it free, it’s a high quality, nuanced resource how to teach about Israel…in a way that’s asking really tough and interesting questions.”
Avi referred to my own article in the August 5 issue, noting that I had written that 50 different schools were now subscribing to the Unpacked for Educators program in seven different countries. He said that one of the goals of the program is “to get feedback from both teachers and students about our content, how they feel about it, how it impacts them – so we give them surveys twice a year.
“We provide them with monthly webinars, we bring in experts in the field, we create programs for them so that we can have a teacher from New York, a teacher from Winnipeg, and a teacher from somewhere in Israel. It’s very cool – we have all these educators from all around the world – and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They don’t have to debate with their colleagues or their students how to present controversial subject matter.”

I asked Avi how exactly the material is presented on the Unpacked for Educators website – thinking that one would need to have permission to access the materials about which he was speaking. But, it turns out, anyone can look at anything on the Unpacked for Educators website. ().
Avi invited me to browse through some of the materials on the site, which I did following our conversation. He mentioned that the materials include a five-part series about “settlements” and he invited me to watch any of the segments following our conversation.
I decided to watch a segment titled “Palestinians of the West Bank | Settlements Part 4” (available at https://unpacked.education/video/palestinians-of-the-west-bank-settlements-part-4/
Underneath the title of the video was the following caption:
“Episode IV of this miniseries focuses on the Palestinian perspective on settlements. It’s based on articles and first-hand accounts that paint a picture of what life is like for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, exploring both the history of the conflict and modern-day issues. The video expresses one of our core goals, which is to cultivate a passion for Zionism and Israel without sacrificing empathy for the other. Use this video and the prompts below to help your students develop empathy for people on every side of this challenging conflict.”

(I watched the 12-minute video and was very impressed by how balanced the material presented in the video was. While I wouldn’t say it was sympathetic to the Palestinian perspective, it certainly didn’t shy away from delving into the underlying causes of Palestinian resistance toward Israel. The video even went into some detail about different interpretations of the term “occupation” as it applies to Israeli control of the West Bank. This is hardly the kind of propagandistic approach that one might expect from an organization whose ostensible purpose is to “develop Israel education curricula” – and I say kudos to “Unpacked for Educators” for daring to provide a balanced approach when it comes to providing educational materials about Israel.)
In addition to videos the program provides suggestions for discussion. As Avi explained, the program has “been developed by educators for educators”. It’s meant to save educators the trouble of having to prepare lessons on their own, which can be time consuming and quite difficult to do when it comes to teaching about Israel in a way that can grab modern students’ attention.
Avi noted that coming up was going to be the first “webinar for over 50 educators from schools all over the world. As far as we know it’s going to be the first time that an international cohort of Jewish schools and educational institutions are getting together in one place – collaborating and sharing resources, going through professional development together, creating this network and shrinking the world of Jewish education.”

I asked Avi whether the program “is aimed at high school students specifically?”
He answered that “it’s a good fit for middle school, high school…there’s Hillels that use it, there are adults that use it.”
He also explained that the website is divided into categories indicating which materials are designed to be used by specific age groups.

I asked how Unpacked for Educators is funded?
Avi said: “We’re entirely funded by donors. There are Jewish federations, different foundations, private donors…from all over the political spectrum.” He added that anyone wanting to donate could go to opendormedia.org, which describes itself as a “a non-profit foundation that reaches out to unaffiliated and marginally active Jews, as well as to non-Jews who are part of the Jewish family through marriage to a Jew or through Jewish ancestry, aiming to increase their participation in Jewish learning and culture.”
Speaking of someone who is married to a Jew, I mentioned the similarity between Kamala Harris, the newly selected Democrat Vice-Presidential candidate in the U.S., and Annamie Paul, who is vying to become leader of the Green Party in Canada. I told Ami that here we have two Black women, both lawyers, both married to Jews (and in Annamie Paul’s case, also someone who has converted to Judaism).
Avi immediately responded to my referring to Kamala Harris and said that Unpacked for Educators has already created a video focusing on her and the notion that she is “pro Israel”. He said that, rather than taking a position on Kamala Harris – and whether she is pro-Israel or not, the video provides footage of Harris speaking on the subject of Israel – without being an “op-ed” about her.
“What does ‘pro-Israel’ even mean?” Avi wondered. “Kamala Harris supports AIPAC, yet she was for the Iran deal. Do you interpret those positions as being pro-Israel? How do they fit within your categorizations of what it means to be pro-Israel?”
“The plan eventually is not just to cover Israel,” but to expand to examine Judaism as a whole, Avi noted.

I told Avi that the reason I wanted to do a story about what he’s doing with Unpacked for Educators is because so much of how schools are going to be functioning come September is still so uncertain.
Will students be continuing to rely on online educational tools to a much greater extent, for instance? If so, I said to Avi, what he and others with whom he works at Open Dor might find that what they are doing in terms of providing relevant and interesting educational material about Israel that can be accessed online will be in far more demand than what might otherwise have been the case.
“I’m speaking to teachers all the time who are all over the place,” Avi agreed. “Yet, compared to four months ago when everyone was scrambling – all over the world” to come up with new ways of teaching, “definitely there are now plans in place.”
“I’ve been speaking with educators in South Africa and Australia” – where school has been ongoing, “and it’s complicated – where half the time students are in class in school and half the time they’re learning online.”
“When corona started our website blew up,” he says. “Before corona there were still thousands of educators accessing the website and using the resources – and loving it, but once corona started, they realized not only would they use us when they wanted to – they needed us because having to switch all your teaching to online, especially when some of your teachers are not tech-savvy, makes your job a lot easier.”
So, with a creative and open-minded team turning out a steady stream of content about Israel that Jewish educators around the world will be able to access, Unpacked for Educators couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time – especially when the entire process of education is evolving so rapidly. And Winnipeg’s own Avi Posen is right at the forefront of what has become a hugely popular tool for educators in Jewish schools around the world.

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Israel

Hamas murdered their friend. Now, they help Israeli soldiers to keep his memory alive

David Newman (right): David died helping to save the lives of others who were at the music festival on October 7 when Hamas massacred hundreds of attendees

By VIRGINIA ALLEN (The Daily Signal) David Newman sent a text to a friend the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7. Something terrible had happened. Word quickly spread among Newman’s group of friends, who had known each other since high school.
Newman, 25, had traveled the night before to the music festival in southern Israel, close to the border with the Gaza Strip. It was supposed to be a fun weekend with his girlfriend “celebrating life,” something Newman, who served with the Israel Defense Forces, was good at and loved to do, friend Gidon Hazony recalls.
When Hazony learned that Newman, his longtime friend, was in danger, he and another friend decided they were “going to go down and try and save him.” Trained as a medic and armed with a handgun and bulletproof vest, Hazony started driving south from Jerusalem.
Hazony and his friend ended up joining with other medical personnel and “treated probably around 50 soldiers and civilians in total that day,” Hazony recalls, but they kept trying to make it south to rescue Newman.

But the two “never made it down to the party, and that’s probably for the best,” Hazony says, “because that area was completely taken over by terrorists. And if we had gone down there, I think we would’ve been killed.”
Hazony later learned that Hamas terrorists had murdered Newman on Oct. 7, but not before Newman had saved nearly 300 lives, including the life of his girlfriend.
When the terrorists began their attack on the music festival, many attendees began running to their cars. But Newman and his girlfriend encountered a police officer who warned them to run the opposite direction because the terrorists were near the vehicles, says David Gani, another friend of Newman’s.
Newman “ran in the opposite direction with his girlfriend and whoever else he could kind of corral with him,” Gani explains during an interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
“They saw two industrial garbage cans, big containers, and so David told everyone, ‘Hide, hide in those containers,’” Gani says. “And so what he did over the course of the next few hours is, he would take people and … he was this big guy, and he would just chuck them in that container. And then he would go in, wait, wait till the coast is clear, and then he’d go back out, find more people, put them in there.”
Newman’s actions that day, and the atrocities Hazony and so many others in Israel witnessed Oct. 7, led Hazony, Gani, and several friends to quit their jobs and set up a nonprofit called Soldiers Save Lives. The organization is working to collect tactical and humanitarian aid for the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.
According to the group’s website, Soldiers Save Lives has supplied over 20 IDF units and civilian response teams “with protective and self-defense gear.”
Gani, board chairman, chief financial officer, and chief technology officer of Soldiers Save Lives, and Hazony, president of the organization, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to raise support and awareness for their mission to provide IDF troops with needed supplies.
If you would like to find out more about Soldiers Save Lives or donate to them, go to https://www.soldierssavelives.org/
Reprinted with permission.

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Israel

Our New Jewish Reality

Indigo bookstore in Toronto defaced

By HENRY SREBRNIK Since Oct. 7, we Jews have been witnessing an ongoing political and psychological pogrom. True, there have been no deaths (so far), but we’ve seen the very real threat of mobs advocating violence and extensive property damage of Jewish-owned businesses, and all this with little forceful reaction from the authorities.
The very day after the carnage, Canadians awoke to the news that the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust had inspired sustained celebrations in its major cities. And they have continued ever since. I’d go so far as to say the Trudeau government has, objectively, been more interested in preventing harm to Gazans than caring about the atrocities against Israelis and their state.
For diaspora Jews, the attacks of Oct. 7 were not distant overseas events and in this country since then they have inspired anti-Semitism, pure and simple, which any Jew can recognize. Even though it happened in Israel, it brought back the centuries-old memories of defenseless Jews being slaughtered in a vicious pogrom by wild anti-Semites.
I think this has shocked, deeply, most Jews, even those completely “secular” and not all that interested in Judaism, Israel or “Zionism.” Jewish parents, especially, now fear for their children in schools and universities. The statements universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.
But all this has happened before, as we know from Jewish history. Long before Alfred Dreyfus and Theodor Herzl, the 1881 pogroms in tsarist Russia led to an awakening of proto-Zionist activity there, with an emphasis on the land of Israel. There were soon new Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The average Jew in Canada now knows that his or her friend at a university, his co-worker in an office, and the people he or she socializes with, may in fact approve, or at least not disapprove, of what happened that day in Israel. Acquaintances or even close friends may care far more about Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza. Such people may even believe what we may call “Hamas pogrom denial,” already being spread. Many people have now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that they see no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred. Indeed, many academics scream their hatred of Israel and Jews as loud as possible.
One example: On Nov. 10, Toronto officers responded to a call at an Indigo bookstore located in the downtown. It had been defaced with red paint splashed on its windows and the sidewalk, and posters plastered to its windows.
The eleven suspects later arrested claimed that Indigo founder Heather Reisman (who is Jewish) was “funding genocide” because of her financial support of the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides scholarships to foreign nationals who study in Israel after serving in the Israeli armed forces. By this logic, then, most Jewish properties and organizations could be targeted, since the vast majority of Jews are solidly on Israel’s side.
Were these vandals right-wing thugs or people recently arrived from the Middle East? No, those charged were mostly white middle-class professionals. Among them are figures from academia, the legal community, and the public education sector. Four are academics connected to York University (one of them a former chair of the Sociology Department) and a fifth at the University of Toronto; two are elementary school teachers; another a paralegal at a law firm.
Were their students and colleagues dismayed by this behaviour? On the contrary. Some faculty members, staff and students at the university staged a rally in their support. These revelations have triggered discussions about the role and responsibilities of educators, given their influential positions in society.
You’ve heard the term “quiet quitting.” I think many Jews will withdraw from various clubs and organizations and we will begin to see, in a sense like in the 1930s, a reversal of assimilation, at least in the social sphere. (Of course none of this applies to Orthodox Jews, who already live this way.)
Women in various feminist organizations may form their own groups or join already existing Jewish women’s groups. There may be an increase in attendance in K-12 Jewish schools. In universities, “progressive” Jewish students will have to opt out of organizations whose members, including people they considered friends, have been marching to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and similar eliminationist rhetoric, while waving Palestinian flags.
This will mostly affect Jews on the left, who may be supporters of organizations which have become carriers of anti-Semitism, though ostensibly dealing with “human rights,” “social justice,” and even “climate change.”
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg took part in a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on Oct. 22 in which she chanted “crush Zionism” along with hundreds of other anti-Israel protesters. Israel is now unthinkingly condemned as a genocidal apartheid settler-colonialist state, indeed, the single most malevolent country in the world and the root of all evil.
New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens expressed it well in his Nov. 7 article. “Knowing who our friends aren’t isn’t pleasant, particularly after so many Jews have sought to be personal friends and political allies to people and movements that, as we grieved, turned their backs on us. But it’s also clarifying.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.

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Israel

Former Winnipegger Vivian Silver, at first thought to have been taken hostage, has now been confirmed dead

Jewish Post & News file photo

Former Winnipegger and well-known Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver has now been confirmed as having been killed during the massacre of Israelis and foreign nationals perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Vivian, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri was originally thought to be among the more than 1200 individuals who were taken hostage by Hamas.

To read the full story on the CBC website, go to https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/israel-gaza-vivian-silver-1.7027333

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