Search Results

People are now coming to recognize a more complex interplay of different forms of human communication, from lullabies to hypertext and beyond. This book notes that the question of causality will not get us very far, because writing and reading are hardly constant at all times and places. At its origin lies a yeshiva class. Comparing the place of texts in various cultural situations might help explain the persistent isolation of Jewish culture as a research specialty in anthropology. This chapter hints at the challenges to the still-prevalent notion that there is a bifurcation, analogous to that between orality and literacy, between the real world and the world of scholarship.

This chapter explores the establishment of dormitories in many Jewish educational institutions, especially in yeshivas, which is a new phenomenon — created to answer new needs in Jewish education. Dormitories became common in yeshivas for a number of reasons. Although in theory students could have continued to sleep in synagogues, this was no longer regarded as respectable. The only acceptable solutions were to support student rentals of private rooms or to open a dormitory. The growing concern about what was seen as the pernicious influences of the surrounding society added a degree of urgency to the adoption of means to isolate yeshiva students from potential contact with problematic individuals and groups. At the same time, the growing use of dormitories fitted in with a general trend for what appeared to be ‘modern’ or ‘systematic’ approaches for dealing with social needs and especially for institutionalization. Dormitories did not usually merit a great deal of attention in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. However, they reflected some very basic developments in Jewish society; they illustrate the great sensitivity and responsiveness of traditionalist circles to the major changes Jewish society was undergoing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter discusses hasidic yeshivas in interwar Poland. The distinction between hasidim and mitnagedim with regard to yeshivas disappeared in Poland between the First and Second World wars, when one of the most striking phenomena of hasidism was the dramatic rise in the number of yeshivas, their ubiquity, and their role in the education of the young males of the hasidic elite. Some of these yeshivas were clearly identified with specific hasidic courts, while others were identified instead with hasidism in general. The multiplication of hasidic yeshivas, and the creative solutions they offered to the challenges hasidim thought they were facing, are clear evidence of the creativity and resourcefulness of interwar hasidism. The chapter then explains that the Polish hasidic yeshiva did not develop in a vacuum, but had as very visible potential models the Lithuanian and Hungarian yeshivas. Lithuanian rabbis were often employed in hasidic yeshivas, and methods of study that developed in Lithuania on occasion influenced talmudic study in Poland.

This chapter deals with the final developments of the Volozhin yeshiva. By the 1880s and 1890s, the Volozhin yeshiva found itself in difficult circumstances. Its finances were catastrophic, its relations with the Jewish community at large were deteriorating, and it faced many calls for far-reaching structural changes in the institution. There was also an internal split over the question of R. Berlin's successor. These challenges did not significantly change the atmosphere of the yeshiva, though the increasing importance of student societies was a noteworthy development. By surveying these organizations and other aspects of student life in the last years of the Volozhin yeshiva and giving a careful look at the finances of the yeshiva it is possible to come to some important insights into the changing realities of yeshiva life during these critical years.

This chapter analyses the developments that brought about the Volozhin yeshiva's closure. It reveals surprising conclusions that illuminate both the yeshiva's internal politics in the late nineteenth century and its precarious status. The ostensible reason for the closure of the yeshiva was its refusal to accept the government demand for far-reaching changes in the curriculum so as to incorporate secular studies and to devote a significant number of hours to these studies. However, it is highly probable that this was not the real reason. The chapter draws from the archives of the former Soviet Union to conduct an examination of internal government documents from the tsarist period. These archives can reveal more about what really motivated the authorities in various episodes affecting the Jewish community. The chapter shows that the authorities knew a great deal about the internal affairs of the yeshiva, and certainly far more than most Jews ever imagined.

This chapter takes a look at a third type of yeshiva — the Telz yeshiva. This yeshiva was a reaction to the perceived disintegration of traditional society and the decline in Torah study, but with no new values: its founders wanted to produce Talmud scholars capable of making profound halakhic decisions. Its importance in the history of Lithuanian yeshivas lies in its new organizational patterns: whereas Volozhin and Slobodka modelled themselves on the beit midrash, Telz was more like a modern educational institution. Other yeshivas eventually followed suit to varying degrees, so in that sense Telz marked a final stage in the development of the Lithuanian system. Later changes were very minor.

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

This chapter discusses the controversy between Mitnagdim and Hasidim focusing on Rabbi H. Hayyim of Volozhin's response to Hasidism. Hayyim waged the struggle against Hasidism in a style entirely different from that initiated and led by his teacher and master, Vilna Gaon. It explains that while Vilna Gaon waged an unrelenting war to eliminate the deviant sect, Hayyim chose to struggle against Hasidism on the plane of ideas and education. It also discusses Hayyim's realization that Hasidim were not heretics and their motives were pure and his establishment of the Volozhin yeshiva.

Agospel Song Asks: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can and it feels like it’s never enough?” The answer, “Just stand,” seems so passive, but as interpreted by those who framed those words out of the difficulties of their own lives, it means to keep on, to not give up in the face of seemingly fruitless struggle. It draws on a necessary maxim of the oppressed: to “make a way out of no way.” Those of us who have labored for decades in racial-justice campaigns can identify with that gospel lyric, particularly civil rights lawyers whose primary mission was trying to desegregate school systems. The school issues of today grow out of societal conditions that affect educational efforts across the economic spectrum. They can’t all be laid at the doorsteps of Brown’s failure, but looking back over the decades, I wonder whether the long school desegregation effort was an unintended but nonetheless contributing cause of current statistical disparities that some critics angrily attribute to the continuing effects of racism. Others, not all of whom are white, assert with equal vehemence that blaming failure on racism is an excuse; that we need to get up off our dead asses, drop the welfare tit, stop having “illegitimate” babies, and find jobs like everybody else. More objective observers of black distress view the source as the lack of employment, the bedrock of survival and success in this society. In the post–World War II years, racial reformers felt that gaining racial equality would eliminate the barriers that underlay the economic disparities between blacks and others. While a powerful symbol, the call for equality was easier to make than for a great many blacks to realize. Just as the Brown decision in 1954 did not open up law-firm jobs when I graduated from law school in 1957, the hard-fought liti­gation to erode public manifestations of segregation meant little to those black people far less fortunate than I as they looked in vain for openings in schools, jobs, and housing.

Refugee academics and industrialists, trainees supported by Isidore Apfelbaum's ‘private’ operation, German domestic servants placed by the Ladies Lodge of B'nai Brith, the two or three foreign students accepted by the Yeshiva, the two German ‘refugee’ rabbis and the handful of pacifists and Jewish ‘Friends of Friend’ supported by the Quakers represented the only known refugees from Nazism to have arrived in Manchester before November 1938. In spite of an escalating ‘war against the Jews’, many had delayed their departure in the belief that the Hitler regime would be as short-lived as its predecessors or, at any rate, that his anti-Semitism had been no more than a device for the achievement of power.

Of all the reversals of attitude which followed the changing international situation after March 1938, the most dramatic was that of the Manchester Yeshiva. The admission of refugees contributed to an already critical financial deficit and was accompanied by fresh campaigns against such long-term latitudinarian opponents as the Talmud Torah. The explanation lies rather in the Yeshiva's open and unapologetic defiance of financial logic, communal policy and Home Office regulations, even of what might have seemed the reasonable caution of some of its own committee men, to pursue a campaign of rescue based as much on the humanitarian dictates of Jewish orthodoxy as its more routine battles for the religious integrity of the community.

This chapter proposes some solutions to the fundamental transformation of Judaism. The most important principle is that no messianist should be treated as an Orthodox rabbi or functionary in good standing. No messianist should serve as a communal or synagogue rabbi, or appointed as Jewish Studies principal or teacher in an Orthodox yeshiva. In addition, messianist institutions, no matter how many ‘good things’ they do, must be excluded from the Orthodox community. If the messianic faith of Judaism is to survive intact, these guidelines must be followed even in difficult cases. The chapter then turns to more detailed issues of Jewish ritual law. The messianist belief in itself, with its abolition of Judaism's criteria for identifying the Messiah, is seen by some as heresy.

This chapter presents some excerpts from Urke Nachalnik's Życiorys Własny przestępcy (The Autobiography of a Criminal), which was published in 1933. Nachalnik begins his autobiography by describing his childhood and the circumstances that brought about his imprisonment. He recounts his education in a traditional kheyder. After completing kheyder, Nachalnik is sent to the yeshiva in Łomża. While there, he receives news about the death of his mother but is urged not to return home. Nachalnik struggles to support himself and finds board at the house of a prostitute with whom he has a relationship. As a result, he neglects his studies; he returns home for the following Passover. Later, Nachalnik spends several weeks in prison and is finally bailed out by his father. He returns to his town, where his father keeps humiliating him by telling everybody about his thievery. His father then sends him to work for his uncle as an apprentice in his bakery.

This chapter evaluates the character of Bais Yaakov as a ‘revolution in the name of tradition’. The revolution that was Bais Yaakov was not limited to the direct participants in the movement, but also reshaped marriage practices, family structures, and the face of Orthodoxy at large. The chapter explores the parallels and resonances of the movement with such Orthodox phenomena as German neo-Orthodoxy, hasidism, and the yeshiva, as well as with other revolutionary elements of its immediate context, including socialism, Zionism, feminism, and Yiddishism. While Bais Yaakov presented itself as combatting the secular ideologies of the interwar period, it also adopted some features of these ‘isms’ in shaping its own distinctive and novel character. The chapter then presents a reading of the relationship—sociological, symbolic, and discursive—between Bais Yaakov and the traditional Jewish family.

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.

This chapter takes a look at how the small town of Volozhin became one of the focal points of the Lithuanian Jewish world because of the yeshiva that was established there. The yeshiva of Volozhin represented a novel type of relationship between the Jewish community and Jewish learning: for most of the nineteenth century the Volozhin yeshiva was the most important institution of Jewish learning in all of eastern Europe, and ultimately it served as a model for the rest of European Jewry. The heads of the yeshiva were regarded as leaders of the Jewish community in the Russian Empire and beyond; thousands of young men studied there, many of whom went on to have a significant impact on the Jewish world. Patterns that were set in Volozhin are essentially maintained in yeshivas around the world till today. There are many curious myths about Volozhin, but the reality was even more interesting. A careful look at the history of the yeshiva reveals not only the yeshiva itself but how a society can change in ways that few could have predicted.