ICJudaism: A Teacher’s Guide to Judaism

      Hosted by ICTeachers                                                                Formerly: Mike’s Rough Guide to Judaism

Disclaimer:

The contents of these pages represent the author’s personal views, experience and understanding.
There are bound to be some things here that some Jews would disagree with.

 

Start Here

This site began as a response to discussions in an email conference with other UK teachers. One frequent topic of conversation was the way that the daily school assembly is used, from time to time, as a way of teaching children about aspects of "other" (ie non-Christian) religions. I found a good deal of interest among my colleagues in the information that I was able to share about Jewish festivals (an assembly about a religious festival can seem to hit some of the school’s RE targets). It seemed to me that a more general treatment of the subject written by a teacher, for teachers, might be useful to others. So here goes...

In writing these pages I have deliberately aimed at a simple, no frills treatment, giving sufficient information to provide both curriculum knowledge and additional context and background. I’m afraid that I couldn’t resist going into much more detail than is necessary.

This website is still a work in progress, and I shall add and amending pages as time, energy and inspiration allow. If you have any comments, queries or disagreements about what you find in these pages please don't hesitate to contact me (You can find my contact details on the Author page. If you want information about aspects of Judaism that I have not yet covered - ask. I shall do my best to answer you.

A couple of notes:

Pronunciation: Neither Hebrew nor Yiddish (see the section on Languages) use the sound that English represents as ch (as in chair). Both languages, however, do use the sound of ch as in the Scottish “loch” (which is technically known as a “voiceless velar fricative”). So, if you see an unfamiliar word with the letters ch (or kh) in it in these pages, it is probably pronounced in that way.

Dates: When talking about secular dates Jews prefer the religiously neutral terms CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era) to the specifically Christian AD and BC.

Links:  Most hyperlinks in this website (other than page-navigations) will open in new pages).

On each page, clicking on the yellow Menorah (7 branched candelabra, like the one at the bottom of this page) will return you to the top of the page.

Copyright Notice

I have spent a lot of time and effort producing this site and it is my intellectual property.

Please feel free to quote from my text, but, if you do, please credit me by adding a link to this website. Please DON’T lift pages onto your own website - I can’t update, change or correct pages if they are on someone else’s site.

Most recent updates, clarifications and (lots of) corrections: February 2025