People
Yoram Harpaz’s family history and his conversation with teachers
Kazakhstan connects an Israeli researcher’s personal memories with his professional work.
Published
This is a translation. The original is Русский. Language review: not performed by a native speaker.
In a 2020 interview, Yoram Harpaz said that his mother and aunt, together with his grandmother, had been exiled to Kazakhstan after the family’s time in the Gulag. They later lived in Almaty. When his grandmother died, the two girls were left alone. Harpaz recalls that Kazakh soldiers helped his mother find her younger sister and placed both girls in an orphanage.
After the war, the sisters returned to Poland to look for relatives but found no one. Both then moved to Israel. Harpaz’s aunt later married and moved to New York.
In 2019, Harpaz, a lecturer at Israel’s Beit Berl College, spoke at a Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools conference in Kazakhstan. He proposed moving away from teaching every pupil in the same way, taking account of their individual characteristics and building lessons around engagement and understanding.