Tag #138567 - Interview #78499 (Bernat Sauber)

The children begin learning to write and read in Hebrew. As the child advances in age, teaching had several levels. Around the first year they learn the letters, to write and read. They get a general idea about the holidays and their meaning. In the second year they begin the weekly pericope. The Torah is divided in 54 sections, one for each week. In the first week they learn that God created the world, Adam, Eve, what did they do and so on. Then comes Noah and so on, for a whole year, until they learn all of it. The teaching method was that I had to read in Hebrew and to translate it immediately into Yiddish. For example 'Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets'. That is: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and I had to translate it right away. Next it says: 'vyhi mavdil beyn mayim lamayim' divided between water and earth [Editor's note: to be correct, it's divided between water and waters]. So we had to learn this way. Each of these pericopes, these stories, have 10-15 pages, and it went on like this. We didn't learn any comments, we had to learn them literally. In the third or fourth year we began studying the Rashi [6]. The Bible has many comments, included in the biblical reading book: the main commentator is Rashi, on of the most renowned scientists, even more famous than Maimonides, who wrote the comment on the entire Torah. [Editor's note: To be more precise, Rashi wrote a comment on the Mishnah, while Maimonides' comment is on the Mishnah Torah.] But only a few studied it because it was quite difficult. The comment itself was quite abstract and the structure of sentences is quite complex. In the third year we began studying the Talmud. We learned all this in the cheder, in Hebrew.