Chil­dren’s

Jew­ish Migration

John Bliss; Jeff Edwards, illus.
  • Review
By – January 10, 2012
This book is about the migra­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple using four peo­ple as illus­tra­tions, telling why, where, and how they migrat­ed from one place to anoth­er when they were chil­dren. The first sto­ry is that of Gol­da Meir, who migrat­ed from Rus­sia to the Unit­ed States and then to Israel in the ear­ly 1900’s. The next two sto­ries tell of chil­dren who fled from the Nazis in Ger­many and Aus­tria in 1938 and 1939. The final sto­ry is that of a girl who left Rus­sia in 2000 to go to school in Israel. The book is visu­al­ly pleas­ing and easy to read. The illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs help bring the book to life and show how peo­ple lived and looked dur­ing the times that are described. The maps help to show the routes and dis­tances that the peo­ple trav­eled. Anti-Semi­tism is explained in the intro­duc­to­ry por­tion and Israel as the Jew­ish home­land is described near the end of the book. I read the book with my daugh­ter who is in fourth grade and she under­stood it and was inter­est­ed in the maps. She learned a lot from it but was a bit con­fused about why there is a pho­to­graph of a girl next to the bio of Kurt Fuchel on page 19. I was sur­prised that there is not a descrip­tion of the Jew­ish reli­gion in the book oth­er than a sen­tence that says, Being Jew­ish has more to do with cul­ture (a person’s val­ues and beliefs) than where they are from.” There is no ref­er­ence to what those val­ues and beliefs are. Rec­om­mend­ed for chil­dren ages 8 – 10
Dana Bjorn­stad is a moth­er of three and a teacher. She taught mid­dle school for 13 years — read­ing, social stud­ies, sci­ence and art. She cur­rent­ly sub­sti­tute teach­es all grade lev­els and subjects.

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