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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 provides an obituary for Ben-Zion Gold, a long-time member of the Board of the American Association of Polish Jewish Studies and was director of Harvard Hillel from 1958 until he retired in 1990. He grew up in a traditional religious Jewish family in Radom in central Poland and described his childhood in a beautifully written and moving memoir, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust (2007). In it he related his experiences as a student in a number of yeshivas, most notably in the preparatory programme of the Yeshiva Hakhmei Lublin which had opened just a few years earlier in 1930 in the imposing building which still stands and has been returned to the Jewish community of Poland. His parents, three sisters, and brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Ben-Zion attributed his survival to his religious faith and claimed that his experiences in German concentration camps 'deepened his attachment to Judaism and strengthened him in his devotion to his heritage'. But he was also well aware that the world of unquestioning faith in which he had been brought up could not be recreated after the Nazis' devastating revelation of what humanity was capable of.

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.

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 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 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 introductory chapter studies the rabbinic texts among other adult male Jews who are members of the kollel (full-time adult study corps) at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). It introduces the author's first, and very brief, personal encounter with the Rosh Yeshiva — the man who for decades has been the moral, administrative, legal, and scholarly address of last resort at MTJ. The chapter also takes a look at the introduction of Rabbi Simcha Goldman, a regular at MTJ who spends much of his time giving noncredit Talmud classes at various colleges and universities in the New York area. Goldman mission seems to be introducing bright young men with less background to the beauties of Torah — a profound mix of human freedom, discipline, and responsibility. The chapter mentions one of the authors' study partners, Nasanel, which plays a huge role in the book especially in the entire beis medresh (the “house of study,” or study hall). Ultimately, it explores the author's journey in crafting the book and explains the yeshiva's Mashgiach.

This chapter describes the rooms where all Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ) activities took place. It specifically mentions the smaller room, the library, wherein plenty of books on the walls of the beis medresh were stored. Here the Rosh Yeshiva holds his 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Talmud classes. The chapter also illustrates the big room, which a bimah, the platform from which the Torah is read on appropriate occasions, stands. They are all male, consistent with standards of modest comportment that dictate general segregation of males and females in public, and with the traditional Orthodox view that women are not obligated in Torah study generally, nor is it seemly for them to study Talmud. It analyses the volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, which are shelved on the rear right side of the beis medresh, right behind the table where the author is most frequently sat with his study partners. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the author's early kollel year during the Rosh Yeshiva's shiur (lesson), with his study partners Asher Stoler, Yisroel Ruven and Hillel. It highlights some of the yeshiva's routines, one of these is the annual procedure in which observant Jews, in preparation for Passover, formally transfer all of their chomets (leavened goods) to a non-Jew, who then inevitably transfers it back after the holiday ends.

The chapter presents a short biography and the shiur of the Rosh Yeshiva. It introduces the people who came to the Lower East Side, and the people who were born in the area, which created a network of institutions that has been gradually dwindling for decades. The chapter also tackles how Nasanel wound up at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). Unlike some larger yeshivas, especially perhaps those in Israel, there do not seem to be any formal recruiting efforts at MTJ. Other than those who are from the neighborhood, people find their way to MTJ either because of the Rosh Yeshiva's reputation as a leading authority on Orthodox Jewish law, or because, like Nasanel, they have somehow gotten the sense that the place will be right for them. The chapter then takes a look at the lives of Yisroel Ruven in the Lower East Side, Asher Stoler, Rabbi Canto, both regular at the beis medresh, and the Orthodox Jewish community. Ultimately, it illustrates a neighborhood where the Jewish population has been declining for roughly a century, and where buildings to house Jewish institutions have been progressively emptied out.

This chapter presents the author's own routine of studying at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). Almost anyone with extensive experience studying at other yeshivas would find the patterns at MTJ less structured and more ad hoc than most. Thus, the pattern of a day of study depends greatly on the individuals involved. The chapter recounts the author's request in studying the sixteenth-century halachic code known as the Arba turim — his first experience studying legal digests rather than Talmud per se. It also elaborates the volume in Yoreh deʿah, in which the author found the time to review over the course of the week: the Mishnah in Avodah Zarah, the Gemara, the Tur, the Shulchan aruch and Aruch hashulchan. The chapter mentions the author's study partners, Rabbi Karp and Nasanel, and his experience in studying with them. With Rabbi Karp, they chose to go over with a piece of Gemara in the tractate Bechoros, which covers the laws governing the obligation to donate or redeem the firstborn of cattle and humans to the Temple. In Nasanel, they began by studying the Mishnah of Kilaim, which deals with forbidden and permitted combinations of various species planted in the same field.