Winter School on Jewish Studies 2013
Winter School on Jewish studies took place in Moscow Educational Center of “Golitsyno” on January 30 - February 3, 2013. As usually it took form of mini-university and for many years has been organized by the Center "Sefer" in collaboration with the Chais Center (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) during the winter student holidays. School was supported by Avi-Chai Foundation, Genesis Philanthropy Group and the Israeli Cultural Centre of the Embassy of Israel in Moscow.
This year 75 students, graduates and young scientists from different regions of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Poland participated in this winter educational event.
The main and traditional school part were lectures given by the leading experts in the various fields of Jewish Studies from the CIS and Israel. Each course consisted of three lectures and was a constitute of the four thematic blocks: 1) Biblical Tradition and Jewish Thought: Leonid Dreyer ; Uri Gershovich, Ilya Dvorkin, 2) History of the Jews of Eastern Europe: Alexander Lokshin, Michael 
Kizilov, Simon Goldin, and 3) Jewish Literature: Leonid Katsis , Michael Weisskopf , Valery Dymshits, 4) Modern Israel: Mark Levin, Michael Pellivert , Yossi Tavor. Chief scientist of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption (Israel) Zeev Khanin gave plenary lecture “The new regional political landscape after the election of Barack Obama and recurrence by PNA to UN”
Besides the traditional lectures format the school program included meetings that created the atmosphere for open dialogue and discussion with the participation of lecturers and students. Two such roundtables were held “Jews and Russian culture: problems of understanding” and “Ethnicity, Class, and the civic culture of Israeli society on the agenda of the Knesset elections of the 19th convocation”, and Beit Midrash moderated by I. Dvorkin “The role of the world's people in the Sinai revelation”.
The school cultural program included a series of evening film screenings. Y.Tavor presented exclusive movies about the Israeli theater (“Eternal rehearsal. Video diary”, 1994-2004. Dir. G.Frank; “STONES” Play about the Holocaust ). On the initiative of 
I.Kopchenova film "Footnote" (2011) was shown, followed by a long discussion.
Taking into account the demands in the previous schools questionnaires for the first time we organized the first acquaintance evening in a new format. Instead of the traditional “What-Where-When?” game E.Miheykina gave a seminar on Networking where participants were asked to empirically test the "six handshakes" theory and quickly find new colleagues will similar research interests.
At the closing of the teachers and some participants shared their positive impressions, in the conclusion a short ten-minute film about the Sefer Center was shown.
