National Jewish Youth Culture and Zionist Education in Germany and Palestine between the World Wars

Project Description

The project's educational-historical investigations focus first on education as a national and social task of the heterogeneous national Jewish youth culture in and after the First World War. Furthermore, developments of pedagogical ideas and practices of a multifaceted Zionist educational context are examined, which offered Jewish children and adolescents an education and escape to the then British Mandate territory of Palestine after 1933. The research is based on the assumption of the existence, continuity, and dynamics of educationally and pedagogically relevant networks in which several generations of youth-culturally and nationally Jewish-inspired women and men worked together transnationally. Guiding criteria of the planned research are therefore intergenerationality, transnationality, and gender.

The research will focus on three significant pedagogical developments in the field of tension between youth movement/reform pedagogy in Germany and the Zionist labor and kibbutz movements in Palestine:

• Siegfried Lehmann's social and reform pedagogically oriented projects in Berlin, in Kowno (Lithuania) and his youth village Ben Schemen in Palestine (1927),
• the transformation of youth movement ideas of autonomous education and self-realization into Zionist community and work education in and for the kibbutz (Jungjüdischer Wanderbund, Brith Haolim, Givat Brenner)  and
• the educational practices of youth aliyah in Palestinian kibbutzim and the Ben Schemen youth village after 1933 (as a comparative perspective).

In accordance with the DFG guidelines for ensuring good scientific practice, the BBF archive is responsible for the long-term availability of the project and research data. The collected data and the entire source corpus are transferred to the BBF, stored there in a structured manner and made available to all project participants via a suitable platform in accordance with legal requirements and contractual agreements.

Funding

The project was funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation).

Cooperations

• Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft der Technische Universität Braunschweig (Prof. Dr. Ulrike Pilarczyk, management of the entire project)
• Koebner Center for German History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Dr. Ofer Ashkenazi)

Project Management

• Dr. Bettina Reimers

Project Team

• Henriette Hiller, B.A.
• Annett Krefft, B.A.

Project Details