Kiev Hebrew Speaking Club opened its fifth season

On September 2, 2020, in a cafe called "KAFFA", the Kiev Hebrew Speaking Club opened its fifth season.

The Club members missed communication without Zoom, live conversation, live smiles.

Of course, it would be more customary to get together in class, but because of the quarantine measures in Ukraine and Kiev, this is not yet possible.

The first topic of the fifth season has traditionally been the discussion of the past summer. Usually, the participants enthusiastically talked about their trips abroad, about their impressions of what they saw in before unfamiliar countries, and today the conversation was about what plans were interfered with by quarantine, and about how everyone had to adapt their life and their rest to new, before unusual circumstances.

The participants agreed that everything is passing, that everything will still improve, and life will once again sparkle with bright colors.

The initiator and program manager Elena Zaslavskaya notes:

“When we opened the first Club in Kiev in 2016, my assistant Elena Bondarenko and I were very worried that it wouldn’t be a success - where we would find people who would want to talk, at what level all this would happen, how to keep people in the Club...It was very difficult. But today, opening the fifth season, I can say that this idea has taken root, that many have followed our example - now there are Hebrew Speaking Clubs not only here (and we work in five cities - Kiev, Lviv, Melitopol, Kharkiv and Chernivtsi), but also in different cities, different communities.

In August 2019, the Tavrida National V.I. Vernadsky University at the meeting of the Academic Council put his stamp on the guidelines for the work of the Hebrew Speaking Clubs. So, thanks to our moderators from Melitopol and Chernivtsi, as well as the bachelor of Hebrew, the moderator of the Kiev Club Ksenia Erofeeva, the compiler of guidelines, our Club has become an academic program. 

By the way, already in the second week of quarantine, the Clubs successfully switched to work in Zoom.

The club in each city has its own direction, its own peculiarities, for example, we could not even imagine that the Hebrew Speaking Club, according to our own method, can be held with older students. Today the moderator of the Club in Kharkiv Diana Kalashnikova perfectly copes with this task. Unlike Kharkiv, the Melitopol Club is more likely to work with people who are mostly over 50 years old. We are constantly developing, inventing new forms of work, we do not stand still, and this progress gives us strength and inspiration".