Search Results

This chapter shows that toward the end of the Weimar Republic the Jewish school system became an institution of protection against antisemitism and of strengthening Jewish consciousness. As the Nazis blocked this advancement by limiting access to secondary schools and higher education and strove to lower the Jewish level of education, Jews turned more toward their own history and culture, while preparing for emigration and also attempting not to lose sight of “general” history and culture.

This chapter describes Jewish education in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Intensive Jewish education is seen in many countries, including Israel, as the most promising antidote to the assimilation of Jews — meaning the loss of Jewish identity and commitment. Full-day schools especially have been seized upon by Jews in the FSU and their foreign supporters as the optimal solution to the lack of Jewish education, institutions, public life, and private religious practice among the 400,000 or so Jews left in the FSU. This conclusion is based on extrapolation from Western Jewry's experiences. Common sense would also lead one to believe that viable Jewish life — that which engages people in private and public Jewish behaviours and transmits commitment across generations — depends on education, and not of children alone. One crucial difference between the West and the FSU is that in the West, Jewish education is conveyed in a wider context of Jewish commitment and activity: the family, organized peer and interest groups, a communal structure, religious and cultural institutions, and family and group traditions. In the FSU, Jewish schools exist in a partial void.

This chapter chronicles the unlikely blossoming of Yiddish and Hebrew schools in Vilna during the First World War. It examines the problems of providing education for refugee children raised at the end of Vladimir Horowitz's article that became an opportunity for innovative Vilna-based educators. It also details the wartime flourishing of modern schools that dashed any hopes of a unified system of Jewish education as ideological differences eventually undermined cooperation between various proponents of school reform. The chapter describes multiple organizations, representing different political and cultural ideologies, that competed Jewish school networks by the end of the war. It analyzes the very process of creating new schools that shaped ideological stances and led to political realignments, making education the tail wagging the dog of politics.

This introductory chapter discusses the growing social significance of Jewish day-school education within the context of the Jewish community. It looks more broadly at the developments within a relationship between school and community. Such questions provided the context and motivation for an international conference held in June 2006 at the Melton Centre for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University, organized with the support of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. This event was convened with the specific intention of encouraging researchers to think in new ways about the sociological functions of Jewish day schools. The chapter discusses the particulars of this conference as well as the research into the inner life of Jewish schools.

This is the second of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and presents an analysis of the Bible in Qumran (the site occupied by the early Jewish monastic community who lived near the shores of the Dead Sea) and early Judaism. The first part gives an account of the rediscovery of Midrash—a term initially borrowed from rabbinic literature, where it denotes the specifically rabbinic tradition of Bible exegesis—the commentary created in dialogue with the scared Scripture in early Judaism. The rediscovery of Midrash was prompted in particular by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–1956), and the finding of the Codex Neofiti 1 in the Vatican library in 1953; these and other examples of Midrash have given rise to numerous monographs and articles over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The second part discusses the use of the Scripture and the Dead Sea sect of Qumran, and the third analyses the use of Scripture among other Jewish rabbinical groups in late antiquity. The last two sections look at the Scripture in the Alexandrian schools and among the early Christians, and at the emergence of Judaism and Christianity as ‘Religions of the Book’.

This chapter explores different facets of the interplay between official government policies and Jewish communal initiatives. It focuses on Kiev, which had a unique status for Jews. It also shows how a ban on Jewish schools before 1901 led to a cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and local Jews who were establishing illegal institutions. The chapter talks about Jews from elsewhere that sought to enter Kiev in order to attend the Russian schools, which had become more difficult after the introduction of strict quotas on Jewish students in 1887. It details how Jews continued to try to reside and gain an education in Kiev despite the restrictions throughout the tsarist period.

This chapter examines Jewish day schools in Britain. While some Jewish schools in Britain are private institutions, funded by trusts and individuals within the Jewish community, most Jewish primary and secondary schools are located within the state sector. Here, the two issues of funding and accountability to the government are the keys to understanding Jewish day school education in Britain today. The chapter examines them as well as the matter of curriculum, which has also been shaped by the relationship between Jewish schools and the government. Clearly, these are not completely separate fields of concern, and throughout the chapter links and connections between them will be made as appropriate.

This chapter talks about Simon Dubnow, who is considered the father of east European Jewish historical writing and known to be deeply committed to his children's education. It cites textbooks that Dubnow wrote for modern Jewish schools. It also explores Dubnow's crucially important History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, which treats the heder and yeshiva as petrified institutions and passes over the new modern Jewish schools that blossomed during his lifetime. The chapter notes how Dubnow did not see education as worthy of attention in a historical work despite a personal passion for education and an awareness of the social forces within Jewish society. It concentrates on influential Russian-language textbooks on Jewish history, including an analysis of their authors, goals, structures, sources, methodologies, narratives, and impacts on readers.

This chapter explores Hungarian educational policies and practices, and inaugurates a triptych of essays about textbooks. It looks at books that were created by Jewish educators for precisely the sort of modern Hungarian Jewish schools that Tsevi Elimelekh so strenuously opposed. It also analyses the ways in which the books' authors sought to inculcate new and complementary ideas about both Hungarian and Jewish identities. The chapter chronicles the developments in the books, the linguistic acculturation of the students, and the conceptions of Hungarian–Jewish symbiosis over the course of the period of study. It cites nineteenth-century European contexts in which the study of national geography and history were the prime tools that educators chose to affect the expansion of their charges' loyalties.

This chapter presents three essays on Jewish education during the Nazi occupation. The first essay, entitled ‘The Spiritual Attitude of Jewish Youth in the Period before the Second World War and in the Ghetto’, discusses Jewish youth and its spiritual attitude in the pre-war period and during the war. The outbreak of war, with the traumatic bombing of Warsaw and the occupation, greatly affected the young people; they were spiritually completely unprepared for the hardships of the times. The second essay, entitled ‘Jewish High Schools in Warsaw during the War’, describes in general outlines the education of young people during the war. The third essay, entitled ‘Teaching Jewish Youth in the Warsaw Ghetto during the War, 1939–1941’, looks at the situation of Jewish secondary education during the Second World War.

This chapter presents a case study of the Jewish High School in Berlin — the only Jewish secondary school in contemporary Germany. The focus is on the re-establishment of this school in 1993 and the associated hopes of the religious community, on the one hand, and the religious self-understanding and expectations of the pupils regarding religious education, on the other hand. The chapter begins by setting out current developments in the Jewish educational system in Germany and the hopes that Jewish parents and religious communities have of it. It then gives an account of the re-establishment of the Berlin Jewish High School and its Jewish profile. Next, the chapter presents quantitative data that provide an insight into the religious self-understanding of the young Jews in the school. The analysis focuses on the similarities and differences between young Jewish people from German and Soviet backgrounds. Afterward, a qualitative analysis of the expectations and desires of the pupils in relation to their religious education is provided. Finally, the chapter discusses what, realistically, might be the outcomes of an approach to Jewish religious education that embraces a student community so diverse in religious, cultural, and social terms.

This chapter focuses on the most common intensive experiential opportunity the new communal and Conservative Jewish day high schools in North America offer — the Shabbaton. The Shabbaton is a retreat focusing on the communal celebration of the sabbath. These Shabbatonim are a distinctive form of experiential Jewish education. Yet despite their widespread implementation and the growth of experiential educational efforts in day schools, they have been given little attention in the educational literature. To address this lack, the chapter draws on experiences in training school-based experiential educators in order to discuss the educational goals of these Shabbaton programmes, the principles of running a successful programme, and the challenges faced by the experiential educators who are charged with planning and implementing these programmes.

This chapter examines the school ghetto in France. The Jewish school in France was never conceived or planned; it just created itself behind the backs of community institutions. The first modern Jewish institution in the country with a pedagogical vocation, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was founded in 1860 and decided against opening schools in France. However, in the middle of the 1990s it was finally decided to create a new school in France. But the new institution, the Établissement Georges Leven, was fraught with many problems. During this period, the students in Pavillons-sous-Bois continued to attend classes in unhealthy conditions. The chapter shows how the history of Jewish schools in France is a reflection of what happened with the Pavillons-sous-Bois school.

This chapter seeks to explain Australian Jewish cultural patterns in the light of the narrative of the social and historical context that has developed in America discussed in Chapter 10. It considers that Australian Jewry was not only a decade but possibly a whole generation behind American Jewry, if not more. The chapter describes how, on the whole, Australian Jewry is still much more traditional in its Jewish lifestyles and choices. The largely religious Jewish day school movement, which attracts a high proportion of Jewish children, is a major factor affecting home practice, decoration, and observance in Australia. Since there is a clear nexus between home and school, this adds to the distinctive element of Australian Jewry. In addition, the community is still largely an immigrant community, strongly informed by the Holocaust and Israel, and does not demonstrate the same varieties of Judaism described in that chapter.

This chapter explores the relationship between children and ritual observance in a school setting. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Danish faith-based private schools, it probes the question of why religious inculcation is important to adults, what adults want children to learn about religion, and how they go about teaching religion to children. It also seeks to understand how children experience and relate to religious practices in school and to each other as “religious” peers. The chapter draws on observations of classes, religious rituals, and holiday observances, as well as interviews with administrators, teachers, and students in a Jewish day school.

This chapter responds to and elaborates on a few key points made both in the preceding chapter and in other writings. It argues that the Jewish heritage possesses material that dovetails very nicely with the qualities that the previous chapter has indicated as essential to the cultivation of democracy and to the building of a certain kind of community within Jewish schools and within the Jewish community as a whole. Bringing in more adults of different ages from within the academic domains, as well as adults who exhibit these essential habits of mind, can, as this chapter asserts, create over time a two-way relationship between school and community. One can bring people into the school from the outside, and one can also take the young people and their teachers from the school out into the community. By developing this two-way relationship one can build a school setting where children and adults of various ages spend much more time together.

The second chapter drops from the top of the social pyramid to near the bottom, to a Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant from Poland. Ráfáel Kästenbaum came to Hungary as a young man and worked as a merchant and moneylender in northeastern Hungary. Kästenbaum left behind few biographical documents. But when he died, his will showed him to be much wealthier and much more generous than anyone had suspected. A reconstruction of Kästenbaum's life shows the precarious position of Jews in provincial Hungary, just as his will's surprising bequests reveal the era's faith in education and the importance of local political coalitions (in this case the county nobility and Jewish elites) to achieve change.