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144 Conclusion Rediscovering Private Schools for Jewish Girls The school that Shevel’ Perel’ opened in 1831 still served the Jewish community of Vilna in 1881. At that time, in addition to acting as the principal of the school, Vul’f Kagan, Perel’s son-in-law, was also teaching Jewish religion in the local Russian gymnasium.1 More and more Jewish students had begun to attend Russian institutions. Times had changed and Kagan pragmatically moved into a new growth area in the Jewish educational sphere. Although private schools for Jewish girls were no longer as popular as they had once been, they had helped to pave the way for Jewish attendance at Russian schools. Something of the nature of Perel’s vision, as well as the degree of change over fifty years, can be discerned in examining the location of the school. Perel’ opened his new, modern institution on the street that Jews referred to as Daytsche gas and that non-Jewish Russians called Nemetskaia ulitsa. Until the first decade of the nineteenth century, this street, inhabited mainly by Germans, as the name suggests, had served as the border of the contained Jewish community.2 In Perel’s time it was opened up to Jewish residents. By placing his school there, on territory only recently open to Jewish residence, Perel’ signaled his intentions. The school, existing at the very border between the Jewish community and the non-Jewish one, represented the cutting-edge of education and the possibility of Jews and their neighbors living together. By the end of the period of study, Daytche gas, like the school itself, had become a central thoroughfare of the expanded and now mixed Jewish community of Vilna.3 145 c O N c LU S I O N And beyond reflecting greater societal changes, Perel’s school, and others like it, played a role in shaping Jewish society. Although Perel’s school was the first modern private school for Jewish girls in the Pale of Settlement in 1831, dozens of educators followed him in opening girls’ schools. Their schools, scattered throughout the Pale, made formal education available to Jewish girls for the first time. Thousands of Jewish girls passed through these institutions, learning basic literacy and numeracy as well as the fundamentals of their religion. These girls carried their knowledge with them back out into the community. Perel’ himself had the pleasure of seeing his daughter Flora, after graduating from his school, go on to graduate from an elite women’s secondary institution in Vilna before returning to her father’s school to teach French and Russian.4 She would later marry Vul’f Kagan, who would eventually run the school himself. Despite the import of these schools for generations of Jewish girls, and despite the critical role they played in the Jewish community, after the 1880s members of the Jewish community were no longer opening or even looking for such schools. Indeed, if Vul’f and Flora Kagan or Markus Perel’s children continued in the family business, it was not as teachers in private schools for Jewish girls. Kagan himself was by 1883 deriving part of his income from teaching Judaism to the throngs of Jewish students now attending the Vilna Men’s Gymnasium. Jewish families increasingly sent their children to Russian schools or to more ideological Jewish schools. The need for moderately modern private schools for Jewish girls had passed. More complete even than the disappearance of these schools from the Russian-Jewish street, however, has been the disappearance of their story. The chaotic turn-of-the-century politics ultimately not only made these schools obsolete, but also obscured them from historical inquiry. At this point it is imperative to rediscover their story. A great deal has been written about the tumultuous turn-of-the-century period in Russian Jewish history. It was this era that gave birth to many of the streams of Jewish thought still relevant today, more than one hundred years later. Modern Zionism, Jewish Socialism, and vocal and organized Orthodoxy all took shape in the crucible of change wrought by the revolutionary period. For both of today’s major centers of Jewish life, America and Israel, this was also an important turning point and source of immigrants. It is no wonder that contemporary historians have evinced enormous interest in this period. However, tremendous change does not happen overnight. Recent historical work has shown that none of the movements associated with the post1881 era actually began then...

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