The aim of this activity is to push the students to formulate an opinion regarding the community and to assess the attitudes of the class as a group.

• Explain to the students that they have come to the end of the first part of their project and that the time has come to summarize their feelings and opinions about the community that they have been studying.
• Give them a questionnaire concerning their feelings and opinions about Jewish community as a general concept and their own community specifically. This should be devised by a subgroup of the class, or be based on the questions we suggest here. An alternative is to combine some of the questions suggested here and some of those that the students devise for themselves.

  Suggested questions

  1. Do you think that it is important for Jews to live in Jewish communities?

  2. If the answer to the previous question is positive, what are the main reasons that you feel that Jews should live in communities?

  3. Do you think that it is more or less important for modern Jews to live in communities than it was for Jews hundreds of years ago? Why?

  4. On a scale of one to ten (ten is the highest) how would you assess the performance of your local community in answering the needs of the Jews in your town?

  5. What are the best features of your local Jewish community? What are the worst?

  6. How do you assess the provision of services for young people in the community? Does the community answer the needs of the young?

  7. From what you know of the community, do you agree with the existing priorities in its distribution of resources?

  8. What is your opinion of the community leaders who represent you to the outside world?

  9. Do you see yourself living in a Jewish community in thirty years’ time? Why? Why not?

  10. Would you be happy to see yourself living in your existing community in thirty years’ time? Why? Why not?

• Give them time to fill in the questionnaires. Collect the questionnaires. Make copies of each questionnaire for the whole class or at least enough for the small groups that will form the basis of the next part of the exercise.
• Divide the class up into small groups. Each group is part of a research project that is designed to analyze feelings towards the Jewish community in the class. Give them plenty of time to examine the papers and to analyze the trends in the class that they consider significant. They can analyze these trends mathematically or impressionalistically, or through a combination of the two methods.
• They should report back to the class with their analysis. The results should be listed on a board. Ask the entire class to assess the results. Do they think that the results reflect the opinions and feelings of their class? If they were to poll their whole age-group in the Jewish community, what results do they think they would find?