LGA and Iqra Academy Students Learn Together and About Each Other

Posted on April 27, 2015

Jewish, Muslim students share experiences of faith

NORTHAMPTON — Growing up in Florence, Eliza Moss-Horwitz, 17, does not remember meeting a person of Muslim faith.

She attended Lander-Grinspoon Academy, a Jewish day school, for kindergarten through grade 6, then JFK Middle School. She describes her classmates as having been mostly like her: Caucasian, and in the elementary grades, of Jewish faith.

“It would have been so interesting to meet somebody who was completely different from me,” she said.

So this spring, the Northampton High School senior organized a way for students at her alma mater to have this experience early on.

For her capstone course, a class in which seniors complete an independent project, Moss-Horwitz launched a partnership between Lander-Grinspoon and Iqra Academy, a Muslim school in West Springfield, through which fourth- and fifth-grade students, as well as faculty and administration from the two schools, meet to learn about their peers of the other faith.

The initiative kicked off last month, when fourth- and fifth-graders from Iqra Academy visited the fourth-grade class at Lander-Grinspoon to learn about their school and their faith. This month, the Lander-Grinspoon students traveled to Iqra Academy to do the same.

The gatherings started with student-led tours of the schools and an “icebreaker,” or a game that forces participants to introduce themselves. The host students then introduced their visitors to their house of prayer: The Muslim students got to see a Jewish worship service, and the Jewish students a Muslim one.

At Lander-Grinspoon, students from both schools filed into Congregation B’nai Israel, where the boys from Iqra Academy were asked to wear a head covering like that of their host peers. Weeks later, when the Lander-Grinspoon students visited the mosque at Iqra Academy, all were required to remove their shoes before entering.

Lander-Grinspoon Principal Deborah Bromberg Seltzer said the schools are planning at least one more meeting before the end of the school year. She said the students appear to enjoy the opportunity to get to know each other, and also to see how similar they are to one another.

“That was a theme that kept coming up — ‘Oh, we did that too!’” she said, recalling the conversations between the two groups. “Seeing each other not as the other I think has been really wonderful. The ability to learn about each other’s cultures and each other’s religions at this age is really important, and learning from a peer is so different from learning from a book.”

Islam and Judaism are both monotheistic religions that, along with Christianity, share an origin to the biblical patriarch Abraham. After several decades of Jewish settlers entering Palestine, tensions came to a head in 1948 with the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a heated political issue today, and has created divisions between Jews and Muslims the world over.

“What had existed for a thousand years or more tragically began to unravel,” said Donald Williams, a professor of political science at Western New England University. “To me, it’s a sad story that religious faiths with a common origin, (that) claim to worship the same god can’t get along, and there’s a history of getting along.”

Moss-Horwitz said she was partially inspired to start the partnership from her participation in Seeds of Peace, a camp in Otisfield, Maine, that gives youths from regions with historical conflicts the opportunity to meet and build relationships through group conversations. This was how she became introduced to a process known as intercultural or interfaith dialogue, she said.

“We build up so many differences and barriers between us, whether it’s a Jewish kid from Northampton and a Muslim kid from West Springfield — you’d think, ‘Oh, we’ll never get along,’” she said. “It’s just kind of an assumption.”

At the meeting at Iqra Academy, students played the Interview Game for their icebreaker, in which players pair off and ask each other questions, then share what they’ve learned about each other with the group.

When a girl from Lander-Grinspoon told a boy from Iqra Academy that her favorite color is blue, the teachers from both schools told them to teach each other how to say blue in Arabic, the language taught at Iqra Academy, and in Hebrew, the language taught at Lander-Grinspoon.

Once the children finished asking each other questions, Moss-Horwitz asked who wanted to be first to share what they learned about their partner, to which the 20 or so eager youngsters clamored, “me, me, me, me.”

The students also had a chance to ask open questions of their peers from the other school, which that day included, “Is there a place in the world that’s special to your religion?” “Are there any special foods you eat on the holidays?” and “Is music part of your religion?”

When a student from Iqra Academy told the story of the prophet Ibrahim’s sacrifice of a ram, a girl from Lander-Grinspoon said, “We have basically that same story, just with different characters.” According to both religions, God asked Ibrahim — called Abraham in Judaism and Christianity — to sacrifice his son, and once he showed that he was willing, God let him sacrifice a ram instead.

“I didn’t know that both the religions are kind of like cousins,” said Lander-Grinspoon student Zoe Lepine, 9.

Hilary Gollis, a fourth-grade teacher at Lander-Grinspoon, noted that the adults are more aware of the historical conflict between the two groups than are the children.

“For them, it’s more of a field trip,” she said. “It’s very interesting to meet kids from another religious school.”

Moss-Horwitz said that one of the goals of the partnership is to give the students a positive image of each other before they become familiar with the politics surrounding the two faiths.

“You can see, they’re so little and they’re talking about, ‘How many gods do you have?’ It’s very adorable, but it’s also just so interesting to watch them. They’re genuinely curious,” she said. “They’re not at that stage yet where they’ve built up generalizations.”

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