Tel Aviv University

Studying with Masa

Vancouverite Jack Scher is a student at Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of Environmental Studies. (photo from Masa Canada)

Born in the United Kingdom, Jack Scher grew up in the south of France from the age of 6 till he was 13, far away from any Jewish community. Now, he is surrounded by community – and living like a local, while studying in Israel with Masa Israel Journey.

After moving to Vancouver, Scher attended St. George’s and received an athletic scholarship to play rugby. Following high school, he followed a traditional British path by taking a gap year, and went on to play rugby in New Zealand. While there, he went on a Canadian delegation Birthright trip to Israel.

“That was the first time I saw with my own eyes the soldiers and Yad Vashem, and it was also the first time where 30 other Jews from Canada surrounded me,” he recalled. “To meet young Jews from Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto; it was unbelievable.”

It was then that he knew he wanted to return to Israel and live there.

Last year, when he was in his final stretch of a bachelor of arts at the University of British Columbia, Scher shortlisted top schools for master’s programs in England, Canada and the United States. Then, his father, a board member at Congregation Schara Tzedeck, read about Masa opportunities in a synagogue eblast.

Upon hearing about Masa Israel Journey – a joint initiative of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency that aims to cultivate Jewish connectedness through long-term, immersive programs in Israel – the rugby player registered to study abroad at Tel Aviv University.

Scher’s life story is a unique one. However, his Masa Israel Journey experience is similar to that of thousands: taking the risk of a new opportunity and growing both personally and professionally while connecting to Jewish identity and Israel.

In the short time that Scher has been in Israel, he has connected to a community and already feels like he belongs. “I’m not just studying,” he said. ‘Through Masa, I get to attend social events and see Israel in a real way. I am living here like a local.

“The Porter School is where I have my environmental studies [classes], and the building is a world-class building in terms of sustainability…. It is the first building that is LEED certified in Israel,” he continued. “The entrance to the building is facing west, the wind comes off the sea and goes through the building. The shape is cool, the air comes in where the building is wider, and then the air spins and goes up. The building thins as it goes up, which means that the building does not require air conditioning or light[ing] because of the windows. All the pipes are facing the sun and get heated that way, and that is how the building receives heat as well. There is a rooftop garden and patio.”

The message Scher wants to impart to his peers is this: take the risk, inquire about your options, including Masa, which offers a range of programs lasting from a few months to a year – volunteering, studying, career development and teaching.

Follow @masacanada for a weekly dose of what life is like on the ground in Israel for Canadians.

– Courtesy Masa Canada

Scientific breakthroughs

Scanning Israeli news this week has a feel of a sci-fi fantasy. Most eye-catching of all is the assertion by a Tel Aviv University researcher, in a peer-reviewed article, that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can “reverse aging” by lengthening telomeres, the structures found at the ends of chromosomes, by more than 20% on average.

“This means we can start to look at aging as a reversible disease,” Prof. Shai Efrati said, as reported in the Times of Israel. Some gerontologists are skeptical of the claims and some suggest it could open a Pandora’s box of related health issues, but, from ancient times through the 16th-century conquistador Juan Ponce de León to, apparently, contemporary Israel, humankind has dreamed of and sought out a figurative or literal fountain of youth. Whether Efrati’s research will fulfil that dream will be watched closely.

And there are other scientific headlines this week.

Also coming out of Tel Aviv University is news that scientists have destroyed cancerous cells in mice by pinpointing affected cells with “tiny scissors,” while leaving everything around them intact and with no side effects. With trials possibly to begin in humans within two years, they are hopeful that this could be a revolution that could effectively cure cancer.

A third scientific bombshell comes from Israelis in Canada. Eliav Shaked and Roy Kirshon, expatriate biomedical engineers working in Toronto, are developing a speedy, non-invasive diagnostic for patients who are likely decades away from showing symptoms of dementia. While there is no cure yet for dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, the pair believe that an early diagnosis will not only permit individuals to prepare for eventual care but allow doctors to study the progression of the disease and thereby gain valuable insights.

In these pages, we frequently highlight Israeli technological and medical advancements but the news this week really seemed like a dream sequence from a futuristic utopia. Of course, none of these initiatives is a sure bet but they read like a hat trick against some of the most damning health challenges facing our generations.

Is it a coincidence that these are all emerging from Israel? It is no secret that the tiny state is a locus of a massively disproportionate amount of the world’s achievements in a range of fields.

Some books, like Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, and many other observers have posited that Israel’s successes are achieved not in spite of the adversities the country and its people have faced, but as a direct result of them. So many of the scientific, social and economic advances that have come out of Israel in recent decades are civilian benefits redounding from military research and development, though Israel is by no means the only country for which this is case.

No less significant are the social impacts of compulsory service in a national defence force that some have called the least hierarchical in the world. Individuals who made life-and-death choices for themselves and their colleagues at age 19 or 20 may be less timid in taking major entrepreneurial or other life risks at 25 or 30 than an average North American or European at that age. Not to discount the value of peace and all the benefits it would bring, the circumstances in which Israel exists have created a thoroughly unique social and economic environment.

Coincidentally or not, also in the news this week was a vote at the United Nations in which 163 countries, including Canada, voted for a condemnatory resolution against Israel; five voted against. It is one of 17 resolutions expected in this General Assembly session targeting Israel, while just seven country-specific resolutions are expected to be aimed at condemning every other injustice on the planet. Canadian Jewish organizations and pro-Israel commentators are furious at Canada’s vote, which directly contradicts pledges made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, including during the last election campaign.

While many are appalled at the hypocritical obsession with Israel, and certainly Israeli diplomats are in the fray denouncing the vote, average Israelis, it is safe to say, remain sanguine. They have seen far worse attacks than that by the world community in the comparatively impotent global parliament that the UN General Assembly has become.

While it would be nice if the world judged Israel with moral measuring sticks commensurate with those we use for every other country, in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference, thankfully. Even through the pandemic, Israelis have continued to try and turn science fiction into scientific reality. This week’s news alone included the possibility of cures for cancer, dementia and aging itself. And the benefits of such research do not accrue solely to Israelis, but to all of us – whether the nations of the world at the General Assembly recognize and appreciate that fact or not.

Archeological find changes perceptions

A human jawbone found in the Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel near Haifa. (photo by Israel Hershkowitz, Tel Aviv University via Ashernet)

A human jawbone and other fossils found in the Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel near Haifa indicate that human migration from Africa occurred during the Ice Age, approximately 200,000 years ago, which is contrary to the popular theory that the freezing conditions and dryness of the Ice Age periods deterred human migration between continents.

These recent findings were published in the Journal of Human Evolution by Dr. Lior Weissbrod of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron of the Zinman Institute of Archeology at the University of Haifa, and they build on work previously published by Weinstein-Evron and Prof. Israel Hershkowitz of Tel Aviv University in Science.

In addition to the jawbone, Weissbrod said, “The fossils now being investigated were identified as belonging to 13 different species of rodents and small insect eaters, some of which now live in high and cold regions, in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran and in the Caucasus Mountains.”

This means that, “in Israel, cold conditions prevailed that allowed such animals to survive. Finding the human jawbone in the same layer where the rodent lived, suggests that these early humans survived under these conditions,” changing existing perceptions on human evolution.

First Temple stamps discovered

The stamp of “Ikar, son of Matanyahu.” (IAA photos courtesy Ashernet)

The 2,600-year-old stamp of “Ikar, son of Matanyahu” was among the artifacts uncovered in archeological excavations at the Givati Parking Lot, in City of David National Park in Jerusalem. The dig was conducted by archeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Tel Aviv University and, according to TAU’s Prof. Yuval Gadot and IAA’s Dr. Yiftah Shalev, the artifacts were found inside a large public building that was destroyed in the sixth century BCE, probably during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Large stone debris, burnt wooden beams and numerous charred pottery shards were discovered, all indications that they had survived a fire.

The stamp and bulla (seal impressions), which are about one centimetre in size, were deciphered by Dr. Anat Mendel-Geberovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Jerusalem. “The name Matanyahu appears both in the Bible and on additional stamps and bullae already unearthed. However, this is the first reference to the name Ikar, which was unknown until today,” said Mendel-Geberovich.

According to Gadot and Shalev, “These artifacts corroborate the highly developed system of administration in the Kingdom of Judah and add considerable information to our understanding of the economic status of Jerusalem and its administrative system during the First Temple period, as well as personal information about the king’s closest officials and administrators who lived and worked in the city.”

Golden discovery

A Hellenistic-era golden earring, discovered in the Givati Parking Lot in the City of David National Park. (photo from IAA courtesy Ashernet)

A Hellenistic-era golden earring, featuring ornamentation of a horned animal, was discovered in the Givati Parking Lot in the City of David National Park encircling the Old City walls. The discovery was made during archeological digs carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University. According to the researchers, “It is unclear whether the gold earring was worn by a man or a woman, nor do we know their cultural or religious identity, but we can say for certain that whoever wore this earring definitely belonged to Jerusalem’s upper class. This can be determined by the proximity to the Temple Mount and the Temple, which was functional at the time, as well as the quality of the gold piece of jewelry.”

Israel has some allies

In a wide-ranging lecture addressing Israel’s place in a rapidly changing Middle East, Prof. Asher Susser claimed that, without a continued focus on cutting-edge technology and modernization, Israel will not survive in the long run.

Susser, who is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, spoke at the Ohel Ya’akov Community Kollel in Vancouver on Aug. 9. The event was presented by the Kollel, Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University, Congregation Schara Tzedeck and Vancouver Hebrew Academy.

The professor believes that the key to Israel’s survival is its universities, which he described as the “powerhouses of Israel’s future.”

“Without that basic education, we will not have the wherewithal to withstand the absurdity of the neighbourhood,” he said.

In opening the evening, Kollel director Rabbi Shmulik Yeshayahu noted the “tough neighbourhood” in which Israel lived.

Stephen J. Adler, executive director of the Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University’s Ontario and Western Canadian division, said that TAU is not only the largest educational institution in Israel, with more than 33,000 students, but that it also houses the largest research centre in the country. He highlighted the university’s affiliations with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and also with the Sackler School of Medicine in New York. Adler said TAU alumni have created, among other things, technological innovations like the Iron Dome and the navigation app Waze. Adler invited members of the Vancouver Jewish community to come visit the TAU campus, then introduced Susser, “one of our treasures.”

Susser has taught at TAU for more than 35 years and was director of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies for 12 years. In addition to various visiting professorships in the United States over the years, he teaches an online course on the Middle East that has been taken by more than 85,000 students in more than 160 countries, including attendees of the Vancouver event. He is the author of several books, including Israel, Jordan and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative, On Both Banks of the Jordan: A Political Biography of Wasfi al-Tall and The Rise of Hamas in Palestine and the Crisis of Secularism in the Arab World.

Susser discussed the root causes of some of Israel’s past successes – including its ability to modernize and the Arabs’ failure to do so – and remaining challenges. One of those challenges, he noted, is the conflicting narrative regarding the establishment of the state of Israel.

“These narratives are not just slightly different between Israel and the Palestinians, but they are completely contradictory and have virtually nothing in common,” he said. “I would say that this is one of the major reasons why Israel and the Palestinians have such great difficulty coming to terms with each other and the difficulties remain.

“Our narrative,” he continued, “is a heroic story of the self-defence of the Jewish people,” which represents “literally rising from the ashes of Auschwitz to sovereignty and independence from 1945 to 1948, in three very short years.” This was viewed, he said, as “a miraculous redemption and justice for the Jewish people” but is viewed by Palestinians as “the epitome of injustice.”

Susser also noted that the establishment of Israel, wherein “the few against the many” prevailed, is, ultimately, “a monument to Arab failure.” He said, “For the Arabs, when they look at us every day for the last 70 years, it is to look at the monument [of] their failure to modernize successfully.”

He pointed to the Six Day War as a turning point that “proved that Arabism is an empty vessel.” And he listed three reasons why Arab states have failed to advance: a lack of political freedom, a lack of first world education systems and a lack of economic equality and inclusion of women in the workforce.

These weaknesses in Arab civil society, he said, have led to “a human disaster” that has “prevented Arab countries from advancing,” and is worsened by the sectarian divisions that exist in Arab countries. The one exception, he said, is Jordan, which is a stable state in large part due to the fact that its Jordanian and Palestinian citizens are Sunni Muslims.

“Israel’s major challenges now come not from the strength of the Arab states but the weakness of the Arab states,” said Susser. Unlike the period between 1948 and 1967, when Israel was threatened by Arab states like Egypt, Israel is now threatened by non-Arab states like Iran and non-state actors like Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS. The problem, according to Susser, is that, “You can’t destroy Hamas or Hezbollah in six days.”

“Fighting the non-state actors is a much more difficult prospect,” he said. “These non-state actors are less of a threat to Israel but ending the conflict with them is a lot more difficult.”

The threat from Iran – which he considers to be one of the three principal non-Arab Middle Eastern powers (along with Turkey and Israel) – is “not necessarily that the Iranians will drop a bomb on Israel,” he said. The main problem is “the constraints that a nuclear Iran will pose to Israeli conventional use of military force.”

“If Israel is attacked by Hamas from Gaza or by Hezbollah from Lebanon, or by both of them together, and Israel wishes to retaliate by conventional means against these two Iranian proxies with a nuclear umbrella provided by Iran, will Israel have the freedom of operation to do it?” he asked.

One other challenge Israel faces, said Susser, is demography. He noted there are six million Israeli Jews and an equivalent number of Arabs residing in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, including the West Bank and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. “Can Israel remain a Jewish democracy with these demographic realities?” he wondered.

Susser concluded on a somewhat optimistic note. The conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis, he said, has allowed Israel to forge alliances with Sunni Arab nations like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, all of which, he said, “have common cause with Israel to block Iranian regional hegemonic design.” In addition, he noted, “We have cooperation with Jordan against ISIS and its allies, so the idea that Israel is against everyone in the Middle East is not the reality.”

David J. Litvak is a prairie refugee from the North End of Winnipeg who is a freelance writer, former Voice of Peace and Co-op Radio broadcaster and an “accidental publicist.” His articles have been published in the Forward, Globe and Mail and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His website is cascadiapublicity.com.

Population growth & nature

The four lines in this diagram are projections based on four levels of fertility of the general population. In 2059, there could be more than 20 million people in the state of Israel. However, if the birthrate drops to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman during her lifetime, in 2059, it would be only about 10 million. (image from population.org.il)

While by no means unique to Israel, with less space than most to work with, it is happening a little faster there – population overload. While some feel it is too late to do anything to alleviate the problem, one growing group of Israelis is putting its energy into making a bid to re-educate the public about the need for stabilization, as opposed to growth.

One of the leaders in the group is Prof. Alon Tal, chair of the department of public policy at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Tal was born and raised in North Carolina before making aliyah after high school, at the age of 20.

“I’m an activist trapped in the body of an academic,” he quipped. “For many years, I fought it, but I tried very hard to stay an advocate for environmental interests in the country.”

A father to three daughters, Tal decided to move to Israel, as it seemed like a unique and exciting place, and he wanted to take his Jewish identity seriously.

“In Israel, every year, we take open spaces and turn them into houses, highways and commercial centres,” he told the Jewish Independent. “We live in a small country. We have the responsibility to give quality of life, to find a better way. We’re not meeting our responsibility to our great land.”

Tal is at the forefront of Israeli leaders calling on the Israeli government to adopt a policy that stabilizes the population.

“We have to cancel financial payments to families with more than two children,” he said. “We should not be encouraging it [larger families]. It means that we need to strengthen the status of women in the communities, like in the Orthodox communities. We need to make contraception available free of charge, [grant] basic rights of women to abortion, by removing some of the strings attached…. We need a policy that [aims for] stability, rather than maximum growth.”

While most Israeli Jews are raised with the fear that the Arab population will outgrow the Jewish one, Tal is trying to make people aware that there are lower fertility levels being seen in most populations, including Arab ones, while Jewish are on the rise.

A main thrust to all this need for change, Tal said, is the alarming rate of vanishing nature.

“To me, it’s very clear,” he said. “Israel’s wildlife is disappearing. It’s happening faster than I thought it would. If we had 10,000 gazelles 15 years ago, there are only about 2,500 now and they were just declared endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Pretty much, when you go through that report, you can see everything is on the decline. One-third of mammalian species are described as endangered or extinct. It’s a horrible thing that Israel is letting this happen. I don’t want anyone to [be able to say] they didn’t know this was going on.”

When the Independent contacted Tal to be interviewed for this article, he was en route to the official opening of a new museum at TAU – Israel’s Museum of Natural History.

Tal has helped write new laws and has also been involved, indirectly, with Israel’s National Nature Assessment Program (NNAP). Recently, the first State of Nature report came out, explaining how construction and agricultural development have introduced some invasive species to Israel – to the extent that several bird species in southern Israel can no longer survive.

NNAP has established a program that operates out of the new museum, as part of a joint initiative with Jewish National Fund Israel, the Environmental Protection Ministry, and Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Its mission is to promote proper land management based on the science of open areas with Israel’s biological diversity in mind.

“It’s not a policy thing,” said Tal. “We want to save wildlife, set aside land, create ecological corridors, stop hunting and stabilize population growth.”

Although Tal acknowledged that the need to do these things is not news to many people, he is adamant that it must continuously be communicated in different ways to get to the tipping point of producing change.

“I was on television three times this week,” he said. “Every time I’m there, I mention what’s going on. I’m doing what I can do. Everyone needs to make a contribution.

“This is really about a change in Israel’s cultural DNA. We were raised on maximum population growth. We now have to stabilize. We have to tell people that, if we want to be responsible for other species that means we have to stop the incredible hemorrhaging of open spaces. If we don’t, then there won’t be any more nature.”

Tal plans to keep meeting with every willing influential person in order to educate enough people to swing the pendulum towards restoring nature. He anticipates that the new museum will be helpful in this regard.

“In order to change something, you have to know,” said Tal. “You have to look at the habitats, species logs, and take measures there. Anybody who considers Israel a promised land or has an emotional attachment to this holy place – Christian, Muslim, Jewish – we all share this responsibility. Just like how I make contributions for the Amazon rainforest, because I understand how it affects me. If you have an initiative you feel connected to, you should support it. Come to Israel and get involved, go on vacation and get involved, write letters to Israel’s decision-makers letting them know you expect the Jewish state to be a responsible trustee of its nature.”

For more information, visit population.org.il.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Keeping tabs on thunderstorms

A thunder and lightning storm over Nitzan, in the south of Israel. (photo by Edi Israel/Flash90)

New research by an Israeli scientist will likely be crucial to measuring the impact of climate change on thunderstorms. The varying frequency and intensity of thunderstorms have direct repercussions for the public, agriculture and industry.

To draft a global thunderstorm map, Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University’s department of geosciences and graduate student Keren Mezuman used a vast global lightning network of 70 weather stations capable of detecting radio waves produced by lightning – the main feature of a thunderstorm – from thousands of miles away.

“To date, satellites have only provided snapshots of thunderstorm incidence,” said Price, whose new map of thunderstorms around the world is the first of its kind. “We want to use our algorithm to determine how climate change will affect the frequency and intensity of thunderstorms. According to climate change predictions, every one percent rise in global temperature will lead to a 10 percent increase in thunderstorm activity. This means that we could see 25 percent more lightning by the end of the century.”

Price and his team registered the exact GPS time of every detected lightning pulse every hour. The researchers then calculated the difference in arrival times of signals, using data from four to five different stations to locate individual lightning strokes anywhere on the globe. Finally, the researchers grouped the detected flashes into clusters of thunderstorm cells.

The World Wide Lightning Location Network (wwlln.net) is run by atmospheric scientists at universities and research institutes around the world. The TAU team harnessed this ground-based system to cluster individual lightning flashes into “thunderstorm cells.” The WWLLN station in Israel has the ability to detect lightning as far away as central Africa.

“When we clustered the lighting strikes into storm cells, we found that there were around 1,000 thunderstorms active at any time somewhere on the globe,” said Price. “How lightning will be distributed in storms, and how the number and intensity of storms will change in the future, are questions we are working on answering.”

The research was published in Environmental Research Letters.

Israel21C is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.

Writing key to kids’ literacy

Prof. Dorit Aram noticed that young children, prior to going to school, long to write. (photo from Dorit Aram)

According to a recent research from Israel, learning to recite the alef bet alone does little to help children advance their literacy – children should be learning to write, and before they even enter the school system.

The team’s lead researcher, Prof. Dorit Aram, maintains that longstanding misconceptions are getting in the way of children’s abilities.

Aram teaches at Tel Aviv University’s Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education specializing in adult/child early interactions and their relationship to children’s early literacy and social-emotional adjustment. The research was conducted in collaboration with colleagues at American universities and was published last year in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

“My research started with children that come from lower socio-economic backgrounds,” said Aram. “What we see is that there are gaps between children in terms of their reading and writing achievements.”

As reading and writing are key to children’s academic success, Aram “was interested in how parents could promote their children’s literacy, in particular those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.” This particular study, however, looked at a group of ethnically diverse, middle-income preschoolers.

Aram began studying literacy with one of the leading early literacy researchers in the world, the late Dr. Iris Levin, working with her, examining children’s early writing development. Levin was a developmental psychologist at the School of Education at Tel Aviv University. She passed away in 2013.

“People are so busy with reading,” said Aram, “but considering young children, in particular, I felt writing was even more fascinating than reading, because it’s more active in its communication.”

Aram noticed that young children, prior to going to school, long to write. She recalled a child asking his father how to write a word, in one case. The child’s father gave him the letters, and Aram was left to wonder, “Did the father know he was really mediating, ‘scaffolding,’ his child’s early literacy?”

Aram began studying such interactions to determine ways in which a parent can “scaffold” his/her child’s understanding of the writing system, help them segment a word into its sounds, connect the sounds with the letters, and understand how to build words.

“I saw in my research that the more the parents help the child understand that written language is really symbolizing the spoken words, and that … when the parents really encourage the children to segment the word into its sounds and then retrieve the letters, the more the parents did it (this is what we call the graphophonemic mediation) … the children were doing better,” said Aram.

Working with children in preschools, Aram discovered that teachers were reluctant to work with kids on their writing literacy. “In the beginning, it was difficult for them because they connect writing to school and felt like they were taking away from the kids’ childhood,” she explained. “They’d say, ‘Well, these kids will have so much writing in school. Why do we have to bother them with writing now?’”

According to Aram, the teachers were not considering the possibility that the kids might want to be able to write out the names of their friends, their telephone number, or how they feel.

“Then they saw it’s not against the preschool spirit, that it can fit very well with it,” she said. “And because they were practising letters and phonological awareness, these things were part of their early literacy curriculum anyway.

“The teachers were unaware that you can combine it and have kids write. And, the writing makes the children happy, because they’re doing something meaningful – allowing them to do more than just practise letters, allowing them to really communicate.”

Aram and her team worked with children as young as 3.5-years-old on writing and letter knowledge, graphophonemic understanding, and early writing – not with a pencil, but with magnetic letters or stickers, for example.

“We saw that it worked beautifully,” said Aram. “These children did very well at the end of our intervention year, and it even predicted their achievements and the pace of their development the year after.”

According to Aram, the key is helping the child segment the different letters and the sounds they make. In her research, Aram has found that kids who were taught to connect a letter with the sound the letter makes progressed more than the other groups.

“What amazed us was that the children who received feedback – like so many children of American parents do – by just giving the children the names of the letters, it didn’t help the kids. It was just as good as saying to the kids, ‘Write this word again,’ without any feedback.”

The technique is more challenging to teach in English than in Hebrew, said Aram. However, she added, “From the studies done in English, we found it is still very useful to segment the word into sounds and connect sounds with their letters. Also, to motivate children to write and to respect their writing, even if it’s not 100 percent.”

About English, she explained, “If you think about Italian or other Romance languages, English took all the ‘difficulties,’ and it’s so difficult to see the connection between sounds and letters.”

But that shouldn’t stop parents and teachers from introducing writing into the kids’ daily lives. “For example, if you want, you can send emails, you can [help them] send a ‘Hi Daddy, I love you’ note … or you can write what you want to eat tomorrow, just little things – a word here, a word there.”

Aram noticed, on her visits to North America, that many homes in the United States and Canada have magnetic letters on their fridges. She suggested, “Instead of just naming the letters, write [a] word and do things that are meaningful. Letters, by themselves, are less meaningful. But writing is for communication and writing is meaningful…. It doesn’t have to mean you do a lot of writing, just two words here or there, a sentence here or there – that makes a huge difference, and children love it.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.