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chap t eR 12 Religious Studies and the Moscow Yeshiva, 1957 Torah study is considered one of the most important values of Judaism. From a very young age, Jewish boys across Eastern Europe were sent to what the Ashkenazim call a heder, a private institution of sorts where the boys received their initial education in basic religious obligations, prayer, and reading. Since not all parents could afford to send their sons to private heders, over the years Talmud Torahs (traditional schools) were established primarily to serve the children of the poor; these were maintained by funds from the Jewish public. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the heders and Talmud Torahs were not the sole educational settings in the tsarist empire, with many Jewish children studying in non-Jewish schools and other less traditional frameworks (the Russian-Jewish school, the reformed heder [heder metukan], and also the nascent Yiddish school system). Nonetheless, until the Bolsheviks took over, most Jewish boys still studied in the traditional setting. From the outset, the Soviet regime prohibited giving religious instruction to minors. In the first years, it forbade this practice in schools and afterward in other frameworks as well. The laws and regulations ultimately dictated that only the father or grandfather could give religious instruction to his minor progeny, and all group study was forbidden. But this concept was not embraced equally in all the Soviet republics nor were the laws enforced with equal determination . Correspondingly, between the World Wars, a semiunderground religious instruction system developed in some Central Asian republics and in Georgia. The Jews, too, benefited from this situation, and in those republics certain Jewish children, though only a marginal proportion, were given religious instruction in small groups.1 In the areas annexed to the USSR in WWII, heders continued to operate almost openly, serving the many Jewish children who didn’t go to the new Soviet schools or who studied religious subjects in addition to those they were taught in the public schools. With the change in Soviet policy toward religion following the German invasion of the USSR, the heder or quasi-yeshiva phenomenon increased in areas of Jewish concentration in Central Asia (especially in the cities of Samarkand and Tashkent). Many refugees had reached this region, including quite a few Jews from both the original areas of the USSR and those annexed during the war. 153 Religious Studies and the Moscow Yeshiva The latter included Jews from Poland, who fled there after Germany’s invasion of the USSR or who were freed from exile as a result of the agreements between the Polish government-in-exile and the USSR (July 30, 1941). Many sought to provide their children with a Jewish education. One of the Polish Jews who arrived in Bukhara was the Gaon of Tshabin (Rabbi Dov Berisch Weidenfeld); he opened a sort of yeshiva in which youngsters could study Talmud and Poskim (Jewish legal arbiters). After the government prohibited the Gaon’s institution, the work was carried on by his son-in-law, Rabbi Baruch Shimon Schneerson.2 Given the demand for this sort of education, on the one hand, and the shifts in Soviet policy on religion, on the other, quite a few groups for religious study seem to have operated more or less regularly in Central Asia. Thus in early 1945 the head of the Moscow congregation announced to the Western media that there were several yeshivas in Central Asia headed by former students from the great Lithuanian yeshivas (Mir, Slobodka, and others).3 The refugees or evacuees to Uzbekistan included quite a few Chabad Chassidim —the most organized Jewish religious group in the USSR. Following the severe famine of winter 1941–1942, some of them, led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Puterfas, resumed work as tradesmen, while donating a portion of their profits to financing yeshiva activities. Thus in 1943 a yeshiva opened in Samarkand, with some 190 boys and young men studying under Rabbi Puterfas . In Tashkent a similar institution was founded with some sixty youngsters learning Gemara and Tosefot (Talmudic commentaries).4 Such an institution was against the law of course, but given the disorder in the area and the relatively liberal policy toward religion, the authorities didn’t pay close attention to the yeshiva and it operated almost openly. With the establishment of the SRA in 1944, however, the SRA did begin to track the yeshivas in Uzbekistan. Yet I would argue that the primary and exclusive cause of the yeshivas...

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