The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education

2 The New York Bureau and Its Critics

36 c h a p t e r 2 The New York Bureau and Its Critics ‘‘i have heard great sighs from among those of us who miss the good old days, the years of exploding immigration, who cry and say those early days were better!’’ Israel Konovitz wrote in 1944. The wistful purveyors of such nostalgia conjured up images of ‘‘faithful and upright’’ Jewish immigrants, stalwart opponents of Jewish ignorance, profoundly ‘‘worried about the education of their children’’ and demanding ‘‘Torah from the teachers.’’ Invariably, these images were contrasted unfavorably with the contemporary Jewish education scene, where ‘‘[t]here is no one to require, no one to demand. And those that do request are satisfied with the very minimum.’’ Konovitz had a simple message for the sentimentalists: You’ve got to be kidding!∞ Few people were in a better position to pass judgment than Konovitz, the longtime principal of the Downtown Talmud Torah, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A maskil, or ‘‘enlightened’’ Jewish educator in Romania, and an ardent Hebraist, Konovitz had been astounded and dismayed with the state of Jewish education in New York when he arrived in 1903. He recalled his first encounter with Jewish education, a one-teacher and one-room Jewish ghetto school, or Above: Delegates at the 1907 Zionist convention in Tannersville, New York. Seated in the first row, from left to right, are Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, Dr. Solomon Schechter, and Dr. Samson Benderly. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The New York Bureau 37 khayder, on the Lower East Side. Konovitz stumbled upon the school accidentally as he was walking along Madison Street and came across a sign hanging on the gate to a stable. The ‘‘master teacher’’ promised to teach ‘‘your boy from aleph-bes [A-B-C] to bar mitzvah’’ while also advertising himself as an ‘‘exceptional letter writer.’’≤ As an ‘‘astonished’’ Konovitz pondered ‘‘the connection between aleph-bes and bar mitzvah and a stable with horses,’’ his attention was drawn to the singsong Hebrew recitation emanating from an upper-floor window. He ascended the ‘‘crooked stairs,’’ walked through a ‘‘dark hall,’’ and came face-to-face with the paradigmatic Jewish schoolroom: The instructor sat on a platform with a single student in front of an open prayer book, while about twenty-five other boys of various ages horsed around below. The student repeated the prayer word for word after the teacher, winning an occasional rap on his back from the instructor’s rod for mispronunciation or a loss of attention. When his five or ten minutes were up, he was sent home and the next boy was called up. A few minutes later two women arrived at the door, and the teacher suspended this routine to write letters for them to relatives in Europe. One impatient boy suddenly interrupted the instructor, threatening to kill him for keeping him waiting for almost an hour. The others referred to the teacher as ‘‘Jew man,’’ ‘‘like they would say ‘China man.’ ’’≥ This then was the true state of Jewish education in the immigrant ghettos at the height of the Jewish mass migration to North America. To be sure, there were exceptions to the norm—a few well-run communal schools, under the influence of European-born educators, influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment and familiar with modern pedagogic principles. Some were beginning to experiment with teaching Hebrew using the natural or direct method. But these were isolated examples in a sea of khayder schools and peddler ‘‘siddur teachers’’ who went from house to house o√ering bar mitzvah preparation and teaching boys to mechanically read the prayer book. The Kehillah and the Origins of the Bureau The first successful e√ort to systematize Jewish education in New York City was accomplished as part of a wider e√ort to create a New York Kehillah, an organized Jewish community. There was a venerable tradition of local and regional Jewish communal organization in eastern Europe dating at least as far back as the sixteenth century. But it was doubtful that this structure could be exported to the United States, where separation of church and state militated against e√ective means of enforcing religious conformity and where ethnic minorities, with the exception of Native American populations, were accorded no special corporate 38 Order out of Chaos status. Turn-of-the-century Jewish New York...