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A couple years ago, a colleague of mine

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and I who do a lot of collaborative work, um, started

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to embark on this project of looking at food histories.

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We were fortunate to invite Pinchas Gutter to come

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and work with our kids

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and lead them through his recipes at our school for a day.

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We made Challah, we did kugel and a cholent.

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The kids just loved it.

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And it was such an incredible experience

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because for so many students, their experience

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of learning about Jewish people is learning

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about the Holocaust.

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And one of the things we wanted to do with this project was

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to broaden that lens.

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Um, and I think we did that successfully. The whole day was

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Pinchas sharing memories of life as a young boy,

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cooking potatoes in ash piles,

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stealing turkey legs from his mom, critiquing gefilte fish.

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The types of things that you wouldn't

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necessarily normally find in like a public school setting

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about Jewish life, Jewish experience and Jewish culture.

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And so with these Holocaust memoirs as an entry point,

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we really pushed out wide around that

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and had a, a big exploration of, uh,

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Jewish culture and experience.

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They got to see what

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that felt like over an entire lifetime with Pinchas.

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And to be able to see Pinchas as a whole person

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who had a whole life before and

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after the Holocaust, I think was a really important

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and powerful experience for them and for me.