About 100 Jewish educators from the United States and Israel were scheduled to travel to Italy this week to learn how young children are taught to explore, create and ask questions. Before they could reach the city of Reggio Emilia, however, they learned that they, too, were being asked to answer a question: What is their position on the war in Gaza?
After being required to sign a political statement, the organizers of the training program postponed the American group’s trip. Twenty-five educators from Israel, however, said they would arrive as planned.
According to Jewish Insider, participants were asked to affirm the following statement: “I distance myself from the occupation of Gaza and from the violation of the rights of children and human beings in the occupied territories, as well as anywhere else in the world.”
The visit was organized by the Paradigm Project, a network that trains Jewish early childhood educators. The program was to include visits to preschools and an educational center in the northern Italian city.
The dispute began even before the statement was sent. Parents associated with the host organization, Reggio Children, objected to the visit, arguing that some of the institutions represented by the participants “support the IDF.” The local branch of an Italian labor union joined the opposition and called for the visit to be canceled because of the war.
On Tuesday, about 100 protesters gathered outside the city’s educational center while a discussion on preschool policy was taking place inside. Some of the signs read: “Get Zionism out of schools.”
The controversy also reached the city council. A proposal from the right to condemn calls to cancel the visit and a counterproposal to freeze the visit pending an examination of the allegations against the institutions did not receive an emergency hearing after members of the Democratic Party opposed both.
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Dr. Pesha Kletenik, head of Manhattan Day School, a Jewish school in New York, had planned to attend the program with a colleague. In a letter to the school community, she said the names of participants had been exposed and that their personal social media accounts, as well as those of their institutions, had been examined and presented as evidence of support for Israel and the IDF.
Her mother, who publicized the remarks, wrote that the material scrutinized included Israeli flags and photographs from visits to Israel. In a letter to the community of another Jewish school that had planned to send three teachers, administrators wrote that students would also lose out because of the cancellation, as the teachers would not return with new ideas for their classrooms.
The trip had clear professional value. The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in the city’s preschools after World War II, views the child as an active partner in the learning process. Rather than relying solely on a fixed curriculum, teachers follow the questions that interest children and develop creative, exploratory and discussion-based activities around them.
The approach has influenced many Jewish preschools in the United States, and the educators had hoped to study it in the place where it originated.
This is already the second time the visit has run into difficulties. According to Reggio Children President Maddalena Tedeschi, the group was supposed to travel to the city last year, but the organization postponed the visit at the last minute in order to formulate conditions for hosting it.
Those conditions included a values charter intended to apply to all groups visiting the city, calling for opposition to war, protection of children’s rights and condemnation of genocide and the militarization of schools. The Jewish educators were additionally asked to explicitly distance themselves from the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Reggio Emilia Mayor Marco Massari defended the decision to host the group. “Welcoming someone also means recognizing the right of someone who is different from us to remain different,” he said. According to Massari, the values charter also will be presented to other groups visiting the city in the future.
The Paradigm Project, however, said that this kind of learning requires an open and calm environment and that, given the atmosphere that had developed, participants would not be able to receive the experience for which they had registered.
On Monday, 25 Israeli educators are expected to enter preschools in Reggio Emilia, while their American colleagues will remain at home.
The Israelis have not publicly explained why they decided to make the trip despite the controversy, and it has not been disclosed whether they signed the statement at the center of the dispute.
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