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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/18267/full/18267/recess-was-name-of-the-game-in-40s-hebrew-school/ <br /><br /> <b>Recess was name of the game in ‘40s Hebrew school</b> <br /> Friday, August 9, 2002 | by <p>My mother and father were both readers. Books, newspapers, magazines like Life and Look and Reader’s Digest. But I’m reasonably </p> <br /><br /><p>So, instead of replacing the Yankees' infield, me and my pals learned to read Hebrew. We studied vocabulary, too, so that occasionally with a flash of insight I could figure out the subject of the sentence. The Hebrew sentence structure was highly convoluted—I mean in terms of noun-adjective sequence. Whoever would have figured out that the "boy big his sister little helped."<br /><br /> We first learned to read simple statements equivalent to "see Spot run." Over five years, we learned more and more about Spot so that finally we were decoding complex sentences like: "Spot, Shmuel the dog of. He has a tail long. On Shabbos he does not go to work."<br /><br /> But in class, as we chewed on meaty sentences about Spot and Shmuel, we were thinking of recess. A 20-minute reprieve.<br /><br /> My children's generation would have been totally traumatized had they by some twist of time seen our recess. They, who dress their kids in helmets to ride bikes, would not believe our 20 minutes of mindless mayhem that we called recess. We frolicked in a vacant lot next to the synagogue. It had once housed some kind of large brick building so that even though it had been leveled, bricks like giant dirty teeth poked through the surface—which was clay, not grass.<br /><br /> In spring we played baseball. With a real baseball—not the fluff balls and plastic balls and whiffle balls of today. And on this minefield in the fall we played tackle football. Tackle football—not touch. We even fielded a football team in the city church league. Our name: The Talmud Torah Tigers. We were not very good.<br /><br /> This is not one of those "my neighborhood is so tough we stole hubcaps off of moving cars" stories. We were relatively civilized, parent-obedient kids. But playing football without helmets or pads on a rock pile was within the health-and-safety guidelines of the '40s.<br /><br /> And when Hebrew school—or cheder as we called it—ended at 5 p.m., we walked three blocks to the bus stop. Three long blocks through a neighborhood where they never read Talmud and where they did rip hubcaps off moving cars or wallets off moving kids. I worried, but who would risk arrest to net our bus money? And in an age when kids played tackle football in a brickyard, guess how the cops—who also were non-Talmud readers—dealt with suspected muggers? The rewards of crime—a handful of change—couldn't compare to the pain of an encounter with the police.<br /><br /> Today, the popularity of Jewish day school has shaken up the Jewish educational scene, and my kind of Hebrew school is rare. Modern synagogues have fancy religious schools that teach everything from contemporary Israeli history to how to make gourmet blintzes. They take kids on camping trips and cultural outings, and even organize special religious services and mitzvah projects. But in my eyes, something is seriously awry. Not one of them has a brick-littered playground.</p> <p> </p>

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