18 February 28 • 2019
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Traveling Trunk

T

o acquaint young students 
with the stories of the first 
Jewish settlers in Michigan, 
Tova Schreiber, an educator with the 
Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, 
unpacks props: a cardboard model 
canoe, wooden paddles, false fur hats 
and more. 
The sixth-graders at Temple Beth El 
enact parts of the trip Ezekiel Solomon 
and Chapman Abraham made around 
1760. Those young men, immigrants 
from Germany to Montreal, took the 
long canoe trip supplying goods such 
as guns and whiskey to the fur-trading 
posts and British forts in Michigan, 
and then paddled back to Montreal in 
time for Rosh Hashanah each year. 
Every few minutes, Schreiber varies 
the instructions, so students reflect on 
the experiences of those first settlers 
and present their stories to the group 
and compare the stories with their own 
family histories. 
At one point, the students play “Iz 
mir! Nu?” Given a card with informa-

tion about an early Jewish settler in 
one of several dozen Michigan places, 
students prepare to reply to the place 
name by calling out “Iz mir!” (“That’
s 
me!” in Yiddish), to which the class 
replies, “Nu?” (Yiddish for something 
like “Tell me more”), and the student 
responds with a brief biography of his 
or her character. 
Schreiber is one of five teachers who 
bring Michigan Jewish history alive 
through the Traveling Trunk, a series 
of four class sessions sponsored by the 
Jewish Historical Society of Michigan 
and taught at more than 10 Jewish 
schools in Detroit and Ann Arbor. 
After class, Schreiber says, “It is all 
experiential learning: activities, role 
playing, games, props from the trunk, 
costumes for the teachers. Each stu-
dent has a journal that points to sourc-
es for further study.” 
The journal also invites students to 
involve their own family to explore 
how they fit into the big picture.

DEVELOPING THE COURSE
That hands-on orientation is no acci-
dent. Dr. Cheryl Blau designed the 
curriculum using top educational 
methods. Blau, in addition to her 
decades of experience as a teach-
er, has earned a master’
s degree in 
humanistic psychology and a doctor-
ate in education. At one point, she 
taught each of the four sessions in 
each participating school. 
As the program grew, Blau needed 
to delegate the teaching. With the 
help of enthusiastic, talented teachers 
Lori Lasday, Schreiber, Ilene Lee and 
Dalia Keen, she could serve as their 
resource. This year, with her own 
children older, Blau has resumed a 
part-time teaching role. 
Each presenter brings her own 
talents to the curriculum. Schreiber 
says: “I am a music addict, so I make 
sure to provide musical accompani-
ment to each session with the music 
appropriate for the time period in 
question. I use Spotify to bring the 
period music to the program. For 
example, I use Klezmer from Dave 
Tarras to accompany the Eastern 
European immigration story. Later, I 
play Nina Simone singing Eretz Zavat 
Halav” (a Hebrew song extolling the 
land of Israel, “a land flowing with 
milk and honey,” Deuteronomy 26:9).
This curriculum has its own inter-
esting history. Catherine Cangany, 

executive director of the Jewish 
Historical Society of Michigan, says 
a decade ago, the JHSM curated bus 
tours of Jewish Detroit for religious 
schools called “Settlers to Citizens.” 
They learned that for students to 
appreciate the actual places where 
the events occurred, they needed 
to already know about the events. 
Wendy Rose Bice, then JHSM exec-
utive director, got support from 
the Metro Detroit Board of Jewish 
Educators to develop a curriculum 
for these pre-tour history lessons. 
Bice called on Blau to develop the 
curriculum. Blau prepared an exten-
sive repertoire of materials to involve 
students in four sessions on the his-
tory of Jews in Michigan. Blau still 
considers this a work that “continues 
to evolve.” 

RECURRING JEWISH VALUES
As she wrote the curriculum, Blau 
discovered that a few central Jewish 
values recur in each period of Jewish 
settlement in Michigan — Jews took 
care of their co-religionists and took 
responsibility for the general welfare 
of the broader society.
For a striking example, in the sec-
ond session, retrieving events from 
years leading up the Civil War, stu-
dents learn that Mark Sloman and 
his wife, Amelia, hosted a stop on 
the Underground Railroad, help-

jews d
in 
the

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Historical Society’
s hands-on sessions teach 
kids about Michigan Jewish history. 

LEFT: Temple Beth El 
Students 
Ruby Gelncer, Michaela Kolchinsky, 
Max Golembek, Luca Mollo and 
Victor Davis re-enact from around 
1760, when Ezekiel Solomon and 
Chapman Abraham made round-trip 
canoe trips from Toronto to Detroit 
to sell goods. 
BELOW: Tova Schreiber teaches 
about Michigan Jewish history using 
Traveling Trunk materials.

continued on page 20

PHOTOS BY JESSICA BARRIS

