Synagogue Volunteer Project Goes Back to School – Jewish Exponent – December 23, 2014

Vincent Edwards, a middle school student wearing a red polo shirt buttoned to the very top, stood in front of Vare-Washington Elementary School with a look of disquietude.
“I wish for a life with no problems,” reads the caption below his photo in the book, All About Us: Portraits of Vare-Washington Elementary School Students, that was produced with the help of volunteers from Society Hill Synagogue. “I worry about friends and family dying in front of me.”
At the South Philadelphia elementary and middle school, located on Fifth Street between Ellsworth and Federal Streets, students talk about their fear of violence frequently, synagogue volunteers say.
The synagogue is located just a little more than a mile away — a straight southbound shot from its Spruce Street location just off of Fifth Street to Vare-Washington. But the worries of the congregation compared to those of the largely minority student population could not be more different.
By tutoring at the school each week, enlisting students in a photography project and providing gifts around the holidays, the synagogue volunteers aim to bring these children closer to what amounts to the basics in other areas.
Society Hill Synagogue members first started volunteering at Vare-Washington after hearing a seminar on youth violence in 2008.
“We felt that there was so much violence in the city, and we wanted to figure out if we could do something about it,” said photographer Judy Gelles, whose work is featured in collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Each spring since 2009, Gelles has provided students with digital cameras and instruction on how to document their world. She has received funding from organizations such as the Jewish Federation of Greater Phila­delphia and Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a local youth advocacy agency.
Over that time, Abigail Vare Elementary School merged with George Washington Elementary School and in the fall of 2013, moved into the latter’s building, which was in better shape. (Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission has been closing and consolidating schools district-wide because of financial problems and declining enrollment.) Both schools had been  declared “low-achieving” institutions because of their poor test scores.
More than 80 percent of the students at the new school qualify for free lunch, according to state data, meaning that they come from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level. The school will also soon have its fifth principal in seven years — and she will just be an interim.
“Many times I think that the children who come to school every day have more on their minds than just academics, and that sometimes makes it difficult for them to focus on what you ask them to do,” said principal Joanne Capriotti, who will retire before the end of this school year.
Students share their worries about violence not only in informal conversations with volunteer tutors from the synagogue, but also when they are equipped with a camera and notepad.
The projects Gelles has done with them have varied from year to year, but many times she has asked them to take portraits of themselves, their families and their neighborhoods in an effort to develop a “positive self-image” and encourage “anti-violence attitudes,” she states in a 2009 book titled Respect Yourself.
In addition to her work at Vare-Washington, Gelles, a 70-year-old Center City resident, has spent the past six years traveling around China, India, South Korea, England and the United States photographing fourth-graders and asking them what they wish for and what they worry about. (The result of this work, “The Fourth Grade Project,” was recently on display at the Gershman Y.)
 During the 2013-2014 school year, she decided to have Vare-Washington students ask the same questions to each other.
She taught 10 middle school students the basics of interviewing techniques and how to use a camera. She worked with some of the higher-performing students but still, she said, “they had to be able to write a sentence clearly, which isn’t always easy for them.” Last year, the district cut a teacher who had served as a reading specialist and did remediation with small groups.
“My wish is to be a cop when I grow up,” said one student who is pictured sitting on a front stoop. “I live with my mom. I worry about my dad.”
The photographs are on display at the synagogue, which is not affiliated with any stream of Judaism.
The project predates the country’s attention on the recent deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., at the hands of the police. The student who said he wanted to become a cop and others were “not worried about getting shot by police,” said Gelles.
“They are worried about getting shot by people in their community. They are worried about violence in general.”
Thirteen-year-old Vincent Edwards said there have been “a lot of people in shootouts” around his South Philadelphia neighborhood; that’s the reason why he worries about friends and family.
He said he hopes to attend the Academy at Palumbo High School, a magnet school, next year and eventually work with computers. Asked what he gained from the photo project, Edwards said, “I learned how to take a picture correctly — before, I didn’t know how to do that.”
He also said he became closer to students with whom he hadn’t had much contact. One of the goals of the project was to build community between students from the two schools that were forced to merge last year, said Capriotti.
“We wouldn’t really talk until we got to the picture class, and I found out they were pretty cool,” said Edwards.
Gelles said she hasn’t finalized what she plans to do for the project this coming spring, but one idea is to have students photograph their environment in and around the school and talk about how it impacts them.
She hopes to have the photos from last year’s project displayed at the Philadelphia School District headquarters. In 2010, the students’ photos and captions were printed on banners and hung on trees in Palumbo Park, about a mile northwest of the school.
Even though the school can’t quantify the effect of working on an art project the way it might assess reading or math, Gelles believes her impact on the students will become more apparent as they get older.
“They are all published artists now,” said Gelles “and they have something they can hold onto.”

Jewish Exponent – December 23, 2014 – Read article online