Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia

10. Struggles with the Orthodox Elite: Schools versus Heders

10 Struggles with the Orthodox Elite schools versus heders T he entire school program seemed to be held hostage by opposition from religious authorities and parents who repeatedly showed their allegiance to the heder and children who wanted to go directly to Russian schools. The members of the school commission realized that they had to reevaluate their understanding of the relationship between the heder and the school. Several members felt strongly that they could no longer try to avoid the heder and recommended that, instead, the OPE should attempt to convert the heder into a “proper” school. Other members suggested that elements of the heder be expropriated for the modern school.1 When provincial representatives met with the OPE board in 1902, the question of the heder was widely debated and the seeds of a new, positive evaluation were detected. Lev Katsenelson, the long-standing OPE leader and well-known Hebrew writer, explained that “educated” Jews had long been convinced that even in the instruction of Hebrew the heder was a worn-out institution that had to yield to the superiority of the modern school. However, the results had proved otherwise. “Such experts of Hebrew, which the heder gave, the modern school did not give.”2 At the same time, Katsenelson predicted the death of the heder, saying that it could not fulfill the “economic needs of Jewish youth” for practical education. Although one would have expected the majority of OPE delegates to agree with Katsenelson’s moderate remarks, the reactions of the audience 144 revealed extreme positions with regard to the heder question. The heder seemed to have defenders and opponents in equal measure. The Vilnius writer Faivel Gets lauded the heder for being the center of Hebrew grammar and Jewish religious and ethical teaching.3 Others disagreed. S. Livshits, a socialist, argued that instruction at the heder was set at such a low level that students got little out of the time they spent there.4 Michael Kulisher, a board member, sided with him, raising the old criticism that the heder “made invalids of Jewish boys.”5 Nationalists encouraged the OPE to involve itself in heder reform. Although the organization was in no position to finance many thousands of heders, Yuly Brutskus wanted to include the heder in the OPE’s school program. Supported by Jacob Katsenelson, the school expert, the two spoke about the senselessness of dealing with heders in isolation. What was needed, they claimed, was to link the heder to other institutions, such as the yeshiva, just as the school question should be connected to what students would do after graduating.6 Brutskus’s position won over the majority of school experts. In the journal Evreiskaia shkola, established in 1904 and closely associated with the OPE’s school commission, the writers insisted that the heder be considered central to any comprehensive Jewish educational program. Pinkhus Marek wrote: Over the course of two centuries, fifty years after their appearance in Russia, our modern schools for boys (state, private, and community schools) have barely reached 400 in the Pale of Settlement (outside of Poland). In the Pale of Settlement several tens of thousands of heders can be counted. The simple comparison of these figures shows how little the opponents of heders have accomplished in half a century. And if, instead of a politics of neglect for the heder, on the contrary , we paid serious attention, and if, instead of an unrealizable dream about uniting it with the school, we studied the conditions for the joint, equal and peaceful coexistence of both schools and tried to help them cooperate, then our schools would function better than they do now.7 Marek added that it was an illusion to think that the school would “swallow” the heder. More likely, the heder would swallow the school.8 Because of the loyalty of Jewish parents to the heder and the difficulty and expense of organizing two schools at once, the school commission came to realize that no progress regarding schools could occur until it had an idea Struggles with the Orthodox Elite 145 of how the school interacted with the heder. As one member put it, “Naturally , the two contradictory systems of education cannot be justified by logical and practical considerations. A pedagog must do everything in his power to diminish the abyss between the school and the heder in order to bring them closer together as much as...