Minna Rozen was born in October
The kindergarten which she attended as well
as the first two grades of elementary school still belonged to the
"Workers’ Stream" of the Labor Movement.
1952. State kindergarten.
On the right, the deputy kindergarten teacher Gitta Olshevski. On the
left, the legendary kindergarten teacher, Sonia Rabinowitz,
holding a squirming Yankele Binder
Some of the children at the kindergarten were
children of refugees who were born on the roads from Europe after the Second
World War. They all harbored secrets . Some of these
secrets were verbalized in the course of years, some remained hidden .
Even after the abolition of the Worker’s
Stream and the unification of state education, Minna’s
primary school, the Jezreel School, as well as her
high school, continued in the tradition of Jewish-Zionist-Socialist education,
as reflected in the syllabus, the selection of books in the school library, and
the personality of her teachers.
Among her teachers was the pedagogue Jacob
Brisk, a Torah scholar and scion of an ancient rabbinical dynasty from
Lithuania and Hungary, who was sent to Auschwitz in 1943, which he survived. At
the age of twenty, he became a tracker, tracing Jewish children who had spent
the war years in European monasteries, and bringing them over to Israel.
1959 school picture of
grade 6/1
The Scriptures and literature teacher, Meir Attiya,
came from an old Tiberian family that originated from
Tafilalt in southern Morocco. Attiya,
who was visually impaired, knew the entire Tanach
(Bible) by heart, as well as the entire curriculum of Hebrew literature that he
taught, from Judah Halevi, through Bialik and Tchernichowsky, to
Shai Agnon. He expected the same from his students. He had no need to resort to
authority or discipline to achieve this goal. The simple fact that he possessed
such a broad range of knowledge inspired his pupils to follow suit. Before
settling in Afula, he had worked as an aide to
Minister of Police, Bechor-Shalom Chetrit.
In approximately 1951, they were photographed side by side on a visit to Moshav Kfar Azarya
From right to left, the
tall thin person is Meir Attiya, the social
instructor Chayim Shalem,
and Minister Bechor-Shalom Chetrit.
Yisrael Matzner, the legendary principal and math and physics
teacher at the high school, was a childless Holocaust survivor who studied in
Germany, and never spoke a word about the war. Both Matzner
and Meir Attiya lived in the same Worker’s Project
where Minna grew up. Another teacher was Yaakov Harari,
the son of the chief Rabbi of Alexandria, a brilliant scholar who was awarded
rabbinical ordination by the Rabbinical Seminary of Rhodes, and possessed an
encyclopedic knowledge of French literature as well as a mastery of ten other
languages. After the Jews were expelled from Egypt in 1956, Harari
came to Afula where he taught Arabic and French.
Dr. Eliezer Reich,
from one of the outlying kibbutzim, Merhavia, who
settled in the Jezreel Valley in the 30s, taught
general history and literature at the school. When not teaching literature and history , he was involved with all sorts of kibbutz work, as
we can see from the photo below, taken by Tuvya Ribner in the '50s.
http://www.ynet.co.il/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3533002,00.html
Later, Joshua Mandel, a history teacher from Kibbutz Mizra,
joined the school. Mandel was a refugee three times over. From a Polish Jewish
family, Mandel studied medicine in Italy, returned to Poland at the outbreak of
the Second World War, joined the Red Army in 1941, survived the entire war, and
was subsequently sent to the Gulag in Siberia. He arrived at the school in
1960, scarred but not defeated. He forced his pupils to learn Latin, as well as
the history of the Europe that had so tormented him. He wanted to introduce
classical Greek, too, but here even his best students drew the line
Boaz Sarig, a new immigrant from the United States,
was a teacher of another ilk. He taught English using methods hitherto unknown
in Israel, ranging from impromptu tests and assessments aimed at weeding out
gifted pupils from average ones. His crowning glory, however, was the
"Thursday evening drama club," where his best students gathered in
the school library to read "The Importance of Being Earnest,"
"Henry' III," and other gems of British theater, in the original.
Eventually Sarig, like many others who followed him,
left Afula for the central region. His place was
taken by Dr. Emanuela Sasson,
a new immigrant from Algeria, who held doctorates in English and French literature
from London University. Her teaching methods differed from those of Sarig, and were less competitive. She introduced her
students to the delights of English poetry, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets, the
poems of Byron, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth, and later T S Eliot and Walt
Whitman. Emanuela Sasson
was the first teacher to challenge some of the central tenets upon which the
boys and girls of Afula had been educated. She left
her husband on the Kibbutz where they had lived and moved to Afula with her children, so that they would not have to
live in the communal residence. Some of her students were preparing at that
time to join Nahal (premilitary
cadet corps) to set up kibbutzim in the south. She was also the first teacher
in Afula to inform her amazed pupils that the Holy
Land was not the sole repository of wisdom. There was no doubt in her mind that
the universities of Paris, London, Cambridge and Oxford superseded the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, to which all the best students were applying.
Minna matriculated from high school in 1964, with distinction, and at the age
of seventeen, began studying law in Jerusalem. Among her teachers at the Law
Faculty were Justices Moshe Silberg and Joel Sussman, as well as outstanding legal theoreticians such as
Guido Tedeschi (civil law) and Shlomo
Zalman Feller (criminal law). After two years of
studying law, she realized that the practice of law did not interest her as
much as its history. In 1968 she left Jerusalem, married Avinoam
Rozen, a farmer from the Jezreel Valley, and returned
to Afula, where she lives to this day. She began
studying general history and Jewish history in "The University Institute
of Haifa," which was a branch of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her
specialty was medieval European history, and her main tutor in this field was
Prof. Joseph Shatzmiller.
During her undergraduate studies which she completed summa cum laude, she gave
birth to two of her daughters, Sigal (1968) and Yael
(1970). In 1971 she was accepted for postgraduate studies at Tel Aviv
University. In 1976, she submitted her doctorate, entitled "The Jewish
Community of Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century" under the supervision
of the late Professor Daniel Carpi and Professor Solomon Simonson. In those
years she was involved in founding the Civil Rights Movement (Ratz) and ran as its candidate for the Israel Parliament.
In 1977 she gave birth to a third daughter, Rakefet.
From 1973 to 1999 she taught continuously at the University, in the Jewish
history department. During her studies and work at the University, she began
specializing in a new field, the history of the Ottoman Empire, with an
emphasis on the Jews of the Empire. To this end, she studied modern and Ottoman
Turkish as well as modern Greek. During 1981-1995 she
conducted research projects in France, Britain, Turkey, Romania, Ukraine and
Russia, in an attempt to document the history of Jewish communities especially
in Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the Balkans. In 1997-1992 she was appointed
Director of the Institute for Diaspora Studies at the same University. Since
1999 she has been teaching at Haifa University’s Jewish history department,
where she introduced the study of Ladino culture and the program of Modern
Greek studies.