In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia

4. For Wisdom Is Better than Pearls: Financing Jewish Girls’ Education

4 For Wisdom Is Better than Pearls Financing Jewish Girls’ Education 62 Although many educators opened private schools for Jewish girls for financial reasons, running a private school turned out to be less lucrative than many of the principals had hoped. Whereas the government-sponsored Jewish boys’ schools had a dedicated funding source, the talmud torah was supported by the Jewish community, and hadarim, with their extremely low overhead, had the weight of tradition obligating parental support. Girls’ schools, however, could count on no such bounty. The same would-be principals who confidently guaranteed that their schools would run entirely on the income from tuition soon found that many parents could not, or would not, meet their tuition responsibilities. This left the principal in a difficult situation. As Table 4.1 illustrates, running a modern private school required substantial resources. For Aron Frud in Berdichev, as well as other principals, salaries were the majority of the school budget. Rent, materials, furniture, and seasonal heating costs could also not be avoided. Although not all schools had as large a student body or faculty as Frud’s, all shared similar responsibilities and many had difficulty meeting their financial obligations. Table 2.1 shows all the private schools for Jewish girls on record between 1831 and 1881, and the first and last years of their recorded activity. This list is based upon correspondence, applications, published articles, and local almanacs,1 and many schools appear only once in the available records. This could mean there are gaps in the documentation, leaving open the possibility that schools actually stayed open for longer but left no written trace. It is more likely, however, that many of these schools simply closed within their 63 Financing Jewish Girls’ Education first years. Given the dire letters the MNP received from many Jewish educators , making ends meet with a girls’ school was almost impossible. despite closures and financial troubles, other schools managed to stay open for years, even decades. The principals of these schools discovered methods of covering their expenses. This chapter traces the major funding sources exploited by private school principals over the second half of the nineteenth century. The gradual evolution of funding sources mirrors changes in the schools and student body, as well as in Russian Jewish society as a whole. How to Fund a Private School? The private school principals who opened the new schools and hoped to maintain them began their search for additional funding close to home. Local communal organizations, philanthropies, and wealthy individuals proved the most obvious sources for subsidies. However, the principals employed these resources in ways that were often far from predictable. Instructors by subject Hours/week Salary/ lesson (Kopeks) Total annual cost to school (Rubles) Russian 20 50 400 Hebrew 18 50 360 German 20 50 400 French 18 50 360 Arithmetic 14 50 280 Penmanship 20 25 200 Geography 12 50 240 History 12 50 240 Catechism 4 50 80 Teaching assistants 700 Other Expenses Desks 300 Rent 1,200 Maintenance 500 Total 5,260 Table 4.1. Annual Expenses for School of Aron Frud in Berdichev, 1859 Source: RGIA, f. 733, op. 98, d. 427, l. 6. 64 c H A P T E R 4 Tuition The primary source of income for all private schools was tuition. In fact, the original principals hoped to finance their schools with generous tuition payments from wealthy families. The first private schools for Jewish girls in Russia may have used textbooks from German Jewish schools, but their educational models were far closer to home. Perel’s school in Vilna, and those opened in Odessa in the 1830s by Betsalel Shtern and Vol’f and Khaia Gringol’ts, were designed on the model of local private schools for the Russian elite. Institutes and boarding schools for wealthy Russian girls had begun to replace home tutoring in urban areas of the empire by the first decades of the nineteenth century.2 Educators recognized that such an option appealed to the Jewish upper classes as well and sought to fill that gap. They would provide Jewish girls from wealthy and upwardly mobile families with the requisite linguistic and aesthetic training in return for generous payment. Reality did not match the expectations of these entrepreneurial educators . On the one hand, there were not enough daughters among the wealthy families to fill their classrooms and coffers. On the other hand, plenty of other Jewish...