The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education

Introduction

1 In the Maine woods, I rock in a hammock slung between pine trees. My parents lean against a white birch fence, watching. They are young. They wear knickers and brown sweaters. They look many-layered, lapped and overlapping. I can tell they’ll become dry brown fruit, that they’ll last. —Kinereth Dushkin Gensler, Journey Fruit Introduction long before temima gezari became a renowned Jewish arts educator she was Fannie (Fruma) Nimtzowitz, a Jewish education success story. Fannie arrived in the United States as an eight-month-old baby in 1906, and her family settled into a dilapidated room behind her father’s hardware store on Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. In those days her family was so poor that she and her two older siblings slept on a bed made out of chairs. Yet Fannie’s home overflowed with the sounds and smells of Judaism.∞ Like many Jewish immigrant couples, Fannie’s parents were doing their best to negotiate an ‘‘intermarriage’’; Fannie’s mother, Bella, was a pious woman while her father, Israel, was a dedicated socialist and atheist. On Thursday afternoons, however , it was Israel who religiously made the trip to a fish seller on nearby Belmont Avenue where he picked out live carp, whitefish, and pike for the Sabbath. The fish were placed overnight in the family washtub until Bella was ready to prepare the traditional Sabbath gefilte fish. On Saturday mornings, while Bella and her mother went to synagogue, Fannie and her father would attend to their own ritual: devouring a feast of jellied carp’s head. When Fannie’s artistic abilities became apparent at age six, her father became her champion and even tried to enroll her in art classes at the Educational Alliance. (At that time she was still too young.) But he and Bella declined to send her to religious school. Few Jewish families looked on formal Jewish education for girls as necessary or even desirable. However, there was a small cadre of young men and women who were trying to change that perception and, more generally, to invigorate American Jewish education. They were attached to the New York Kehillah’s Bureau of Education, which was established in 1910 to modernize and standardize 2 The Benderly Boys Jewish education in the city with the largest Jewish community in the world. They were led by Samson Benderly, a visionary, strong-willed educator who grew up in Safed, Palestine, and abandoned a promising medical career in order to save Jewish souls and hasten an American Jewish renascence. One of the Bureau’s central projects in the 1910s was a string of Jewish girls’ schools, designed to begin narrowing the ratio of boys to girls in the system, while providing a laboratory for experimentation with new methods and teaching materials . In Brownsville, the local Bureau school branch met at the Stone Avenue Talmud Torah. Fannie passed the building frequently on her way to the library and hardly paid it any notice. One afternoon, however, she saw a new sign over the entryway advertising a Sunday morning picnic in Prospect Park for girls between the ages of seven and ten. Recreational activities like picnics, slide shows, and story hours were popular Bureau recruitment devices. In Fannie’s case the tactic worked exactly as envisioned. When she arrived home, she announced to her mother that she was going on a picnic. Her mother, apparently, did not know what a picnic was and reacted skeptically. But when Fannie explained that the event was being sponsored by the Talmud Torah, Bella readily consented. The following Sunday Fannie arrived with a brown-bag lunch in her hand and a penny in her pocket. It turned out to be an unforgettable experience, ‘‘the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.’’ There was the enormous fun of playing games, and rolling in the grass—the sensation of grass under one’s bare feet was a rare treat for a city kid. The ice cream that the young Bureau sta√ers distributed for dessert was greeted with cheers. But the activity that made the deepest impression on Fannie was the performance of a play depicting the biblical story of Joseph. ‘‘My Bubbie used to tell me that story over and over again, I loved it!’’ she recalled. ‘‘This was the first live play I had ever seen with real make-up and ‘gorgeous’ costumes. . . . We were so absorbed with this colorful pageant. Tears rolled down our...