The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education

Part I: Making Order out of Chaos, 1900–1939

pa r t i Making Order out of Chaos, 1900–1939 13 O n a sunny June afternoon in 1910, nineteen-year-old Israel Chipkin entered the familiar portals of the Educational Alliance building on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was scheduled to meet with Dr. Samson Benderly. For two years the building had served as the home of his beloved Dr. Herzl Zion Club, and his thoughts may have momentarily strayed to memories of the Hebrew-speaking society he had helped to found soon after Theodor Herzl’s death in August 1904. Two of his club mates, Samuel Abrams and Abba Hillel Silver, had recently enrolled at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the Reform movement ’s rabbinical seminary. Chipkin, too, was giving serious consideration to a rabbinical career, although his more traditional bent propelled him to look to the Jewish Theological Seminary (jts). He arranged a meeting with Professor Israel Friedlaender, a scholar of Bible at jts, who had taken an interest in Jewish youth organizations. Chipkin became acquainted with Friedlaender through their mutual work in Young Judaea, an umbrella organization for the burgeoning Zionist youth groups that were forming throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Chipkin helped to organize its founding conference a year earlier, in 1909, where Friedlaender was elected president. Friedlaender was delighted to help Chipkin enroll in the Jewish Theological Seminary. But the professor had also recently become chairman of the newly created Bureau of Education, and he suspected that the young man’s talents as a youth leader and his devotion to Hebrew would make him an ideal Jewish educator. Before he made his decision about rabbinical school, Friedlaender advised, Chipkin should meet with Benderly. Chipkin agreed, and Friedlaender arranged the conference.∞ Just a few years earlier it would have been almost unimaginable to counsel a promising lad like Chipkin to take up Jewish education as a profession. The status of the average Hebrew teacher in New York was low and his lot deplorable. Even in the best schools, salaries ranged from $25 to $40 per month, for between twentytwo and twenty-five hours of teaching per week, hardly enough for a family to live on. There was no job security, and classrooms were typically overcrowded and in disrepair.≤ But with the opening of the Bureau of Education and the arrival of Benderly from Baltimore, a new optimism was in the air. With the financial backing of banker and philanthropist Jacob Schi√, Benderly aimed to reform the existing system and professionalize Jewish education. He was looking to attract to 14 Order out of Chaos the Bureau a cadre of young college men and women whom he could train to be the next generation of Jewish educational leaders, and Israel Chipkin had just the credentials he was looking for. Benderly was not charismatic in the conventional sense, but in those early years he could inspire communal leaders and college students alike by dint of his personal magnetism. ‘‘He could enter a room and begin to weave his spell on the crowd,’’ remembered one of his former associates. ‘‘He wasn’t an orator, but he could get into any small group of people and just bewitch [them]. There’s no question about it.’’ On that June 1910 day, Benderly could not have had a more receptive audience. As Benderly laid out for Chipkin his vision of a community-based Jewish educational system under the direction of professional pedagogues and administrators, Chipkin welled with excitement. Benderly’s exhortations about ‘‘the limitations and compensating opportunities of the creative pioneer’’ had a ring of familiarity to the young man, who in 1906 had acted in and helped to stage perhaps the first Hebrew play produced in America, Abraham Goldfaden’s David Ba-Milchomo; the di≈culties of pioneering did not deter him in the least. Forty years later, Chipkin could still vividly recall the meeting. ‘‘I was enthralled by the challenge, the adventure and the dream. And who could dream with more enchanting fantasy or inspire with greater pioneering audacity than this great teacher and master. Like the dream for Zion which Theodor Herzl aroused in me when I was a pupil in an afternoon Yeshiva in New York City, so my interview with Dr. Benderly filled my soul with a new vision. I had a mission to perform as a Jew in and for America.’’≥ Near the end of his pitch to a...