26 October 2007

WDYTYA - Steven Page

In Thursday evening's episode following his maternal line allows Steven Page to explore the life of a Jewish immigrant family in early 20th century Toronto, and trace them back to Poland. There is a good web article supporting the program. While at the site don't forget to visit the Digging Back section to see if there's one of the short video educational segments you haven't viewed.
Maybe it's obvious, but a teaching opportunity was missed when it was not pointed out that only because the family ancestral home-town was mentioned in a diary could they identify it. Without that family record they would probably be stuck only knowing the information from the census, that the ancestor was born in Russian dominated Poland.
The final scene had Page visiting the site of a former Jewish cemetery in his Polish ancestral village, which no longer has Jewish residents owing to the inhumanity of one race against another. The desolate cemetery is marked by a monument erected by local historians.
In an interesting juxtaposition the following program, The Nature of Things, featured locations where people had been driven out by climate change. If that climate change is being caused by our over-reliance on fossil fuels maybe that depopulation too is an example of the effects of blind inhumanity.

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