>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]   >> Good afternoon.
I'm Peggy Pearlstein head of the Hebraic Section here in the African
and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress.
Welcome to today's program cosponsored
with the European Division.
Dr. Eliyana Adler a long time researcher here
at the library will be speaking about her new book,
The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia.
And I'm gonna ask Ms. Sharon Horowitz,
our senior Reference Librarian to introduce the speaker.
[ Silence ]   >> Thanks.
On behalf of the Hebraic Section and the European Division welcome
to the African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room.
Our speaker today is Dr. Eliyana Adler research associate
at the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies,
University of Maryland, College Park and also Sosland Foundation Fellow
at The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
at the United States Holocaust Museum.
She received her Ph.D. in modern Jewish history
from Brandeis University, where she also received her M.A.
in Women's studies and Near Eastern and Judaic studies.
Dr. Adler is the author many articles and encyclopedia entries.
She has presented her work at various conferences and workshop.
Currently, at The Center
for Advanced Holocaust Studies she is researching the cultural
and educational institutions created in Jewish evacuee
and refugee communities in Central Asia.
We are delighted to have Dr. Adler here with us.
This afternoon, she will speak about her new book In Her Hands:
The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia.
For those who are interested, the book will be available for sale
in the back after the lecture.
Before I turn the podium over to Dr. Adler,
let me make an administrative announcement.
This event is being video taped for subsequent broadcast
on the library's webcast and other media.
There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture
in which members of the audience are encouraged
to ask questions and offer comments.
But please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded
and later broadcast as part of this event.
By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting
to the library's possible reproduction
and transmission of your remarks.
And now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Eliyana Adler.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
It's a great pleasure to have the opportunity of speaking here.
I have been in and out of this room and other rooms in the library
as a researcher since coming to Maryland in I think 2002.
And I am-- every time I'm here I'm just amazed at the depth
and breadth of the collection.
Things that are so obscure that I couldn't even find them
in the original countries that they came from sometimes are here,
sometimes I'll find something by another author
that I wasn't even expecting when I do some searches.
So it's just always a surprise and always interesting to work here.
And in particular I have enjoyed my time here in the African
and Middle East Division, in the European Division
and also with the Law Library.
I've spent a lot of time over there also.
So, thanks for bringing me back to this wonderful place
to present some of my findings.
This examination of education for Jewish girls
in 19th century Russia was motivated by a number of questions.
First of all, there just was very little information out there
when I began this project
as a doctoral student a really long time ago.
Numerous books and articles have been written about the heder,
the central primary educational institution for Jewish boys
in Eastern Europe and really in medieval
and modern Europe as a whole.
But the information about girl's education was sparse, anecdotal
and frustratingly opaque and I'll just give you one example.
Louis Greenberg writing in the 1940s opened a lengthy description
of the heder with the following observation.
I quote, "In fact", he says,
"there was practically no illiteracy among Russian Jewry,
for almost every male and in many cases females too could read the
prayer book and the Bible."
And then he goes on to talk about the heder for pages
and pages leaving us with this sort
of enchanting little piece of information.
Many Jewish girls could read the Bible and the prayer book
but nothing else about it.   How did they learn how?
Who taught them?   Where did they learn?
How much could they understand what they were reading?
And there's also in the literature of Eastern Europe there's the image
of the pious grandmother reading Tsene u-rene,
the Yiddish tisch translation of the Bible, of women reading
from women's prayer, tkhines.
It's very prevalent, very normative and there again
but without much sense of how that came about.
Even more intriguing I think for me was the emergence inn the late,
in the late 19th century of some very educated
and some very fascinating Jewish women, among them,
just to give a couple examples on I guess your left is Gesia Gelfman one
of the first revolutionaries.
She was-- died in prison, Tsarist prison, for being part
of the successful effort to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.
On the other side is Pauline Wengeroff, a prominent educator
and Zionist of the late 19th and early 20th century.
So, where did people like that,
obviously Gesia Gelfman had to have known Russian.
She was part of a Russian revolutionary band.
Pauline Wengeroff knew Hebrew, she taught Hebrew to Jewish girls
in Vilna in the 20th century.
So here again, where did this people come from?
These are some of the questions that motivated this research.
And in order to answer those questions as best I can,
I want to take us back to 1831, the early part
of the 19th century and the city of Vilna.
In 1831, a man by the name of Shevel Perel opened the first private
modern school for Jewish girls in the Pale of Settlement,
the area in Russia where Jews where permitted to live.
There-- when I emphasized that it was a private and a modern school
but it was also just the first school for Jewish girls in the Pale
of Settlement, the first school at all.
Most boys at this period
in the 1830s attended the Jewish heder if only for a few years.
In 1847 the Tsarist government estimated that there were
over 5000 hadarim in the empire
and that's undoubtedly and underestimate.
There were plenty of ones they didn't know about.
Boys learn to decode Hebrew text and the rudiments
of their faith in these schools.
A few went on to the more rigorous yeshiva, the higher level
of education, but most entered the family business, apprenticeship,
tried to earn a living in whatever way they could
after their Bar Mitzvah.
Girls by contrast, had do access to formal Jewish education
until Perel school opened.
However, by 1881, 50 years later, there were well
over 100 private schools for Jewish girls.
Each one was unique and as much as I would like to I can't talk about all
of them today so I'm gonna use Perel school as sort of a case study
and talk about what he did, what he founded, how it changed overtime
and look at a few different areas of his school.
And at the end I'm happy to answer questions more specifically
about some of these areas.
This is really an overview or more generally
about the phenomenon overall.
Alright, so Shevel Smuelovich Perel was born around the turn
of the 19th century into the petty townsman,
the state, the meshchanstvo.
He was educated at home until he entered the Vilna Gymnasium.
I actually went looking for his records and I was unable
to find them but that doesn't mean that he didn't really go there.
The-- many things have happened in Eastern Europe since the early part
of the 19th century and none of them really conducive
This was very unusual for the period.
And I'm inclined to believe him also because of his fluency in Russian.
He carried on lengthy correspondents with the government about his school
and about his efforts to expand it all in quite good Russian.
Just to give an example of how rare this was.
In 1824, so slightly before this, in all of the secondary schools
in the whole Vilna province there were two Jewish boys listed
as in attendance.
And in 1841, when things had already changed a bit there were 13 Jewish
boys in this same region studying in Russian schools.
>> And most of this would have been, again, in the secondary schools.
It was much more common for those few Jews who did go
to Russian educational institutions
to attend the higher level schools rather
than the lower level elementary schools.
There were also more secondary than elementary schools
but that's another interesting question
about the Russian education.
When Perel graduated he was probably the only Jew in his school and one
of a small minority of Jews in Vilna to be fluent
in reading and writing Russian.
So after this somewhat unorthodox education,
he proceeded down on seemingly more traditional path
in terms of his family life.
He married in his early 20s and he and his wife Sara
about whom nothing else is reported had six children
who survived in to adulthood.   Their first child was born in 1822.
Nine years later he opened this school for Jewish girls.
That Perel become an educator is not at all surprising.
I forgot to put up the picture before of the traditional education,
the heder melamed, the heder teacher and his wife turn
of the century Lithuania.   Oops, yes, okay.
So someone as educated as Perel
but without higher education had very view other employment
opportunities, had his family had the means to let him go
on to university, he could have become a dentist,
a pharmacist that were certain professions open to Jews.
For Russian non-Jews, for ethic Russians graduation
from gymnasium meant a sure profession.
They automatically, anyone who graduated a man
from the gymnasium could enter in to the civil service
and have pretty much assured employment for life.
Perel wasn't eligible for that so not going to university,
not being a Christian very few options to him.
There again, he couldn't teach in a Russian gymnasium himself
so a Jewish school made sense but he wasn't going to become a melamed.
He didn't have the skills probably to do so
and I'm sure he didn't look the part either.
I'm sure he was much more modern.
I don't have any picture of him than this melamed.
So that he would in to Jewish education make sense.
The only remaining question is, why girls?
And I-- I've done a lot of thinking about that
and I wrote about it at some length.
But briefly I think that he taught girls because of serendipity rather
than because of an organize plan to do so.
There is some evidence that in 1830 Perel actually tried
to open a school for Jewish boys,
a modern school this would have been, and it didn't work out.
And what I imagine happened, although I don't have evidence
of this, is that some of the families who Perel went to,
to try and interest them in his school for boys said
that they weren't interested but they had some daughters at home
and might be a lot more comfortable offering their daughters
on modern education than their sons.
Vilna was at this time an emerging center of the Haskalah,
the Jewish Enlightenment, but a much more sort
of fundamentally really a center of rabbinic scholarship
and sending a Jewish boy to school
where that boy wouldn't get a very strong foundation
in traditional Jewish text was going to be a risk, a liability
and it was different for Jewish girls where there isn't the same,
according to traditional Jewish law,
the same requirements regarding her education in the Torah.
[ Pause ]   >> Alright.
So, this is not to say
that he didn't take his mission seriously just
because he may have sort of fallen in to the education of Jewish girls.
And I'll quote briefly from an 1848 request he wrote to the government.
He says, "It is common knowledge that the education
of women represents one of the most important means
of enlightenment among the men.
Consequently, if the mother received proper education before marriage,
she would be able to provide her children
with the appropriate education."
He came to appreciate the potential of his work and, of course,
he was smart enough to know what to say in official correspondence.
But I-- nonetheless, I believe that he started
out with the idea of teaching boys.
By 1830, around the time when he opened the school,
there were already a handful of other modern schools for Jewish boys
in the Pale of Settlement.
There was on ill-fated one that opened in Uman in 1822.
There was a more successful one that opened in Odessa in 1826.
Elements of the Jewish community, at least in these larger
and more cosmopolitan areas had a growing interest
in the benefits of modern education.
Perel was ideally suited for this kind of work and Vilna turned
out to be a successful place to begin his first school.
We may never know exactly the thoughts and actions
that preceded his decision to open the school.
What is clear is that it thrived for several decades
and there were clearly members of the Jewish community
to supported Perel's work and sent their daughters to his school.
The first school for Jewish girls in Russia was able
to provided thousands of Jewish girls, literally thousands,
he was opened for a long time and I have the numbers of his enrollments,
with a foundation in the Russian language and other subjects.
So what were the subjects?
That's the next section I wanna discuss.
How in fact would one create a Jewish school
with so few models to work with?
When Perel school opened in 1831 there were two classes.
As of 1850, on the closure of rival school, he requested
and he accepted the students from that other school
and requested permission to add a third class.
And this, what I have up here now is an 1854 advertisement
for the school.
It's-- half is in Yiddish, half is in Russian.
It's a poster.
It was hung up around Vilna to interest people in his school
and it goes through the classes and it bring sort of justification
for what the school does as well as something
about the pricing of the education.
According to this advertisement, the school offered Russian, German,
math and writing skills in all of the classes.
And as per Jewish subjects, Yiddish was offered in the first class
and religion only in the second and third.
Students took geography in the upper two classes and Russian history only
in the third and highest level.
Parents could pay extra for their daughters
to study crafts, dance and music.
And by 1861, Perel had added yet another level to the school.
So, he just kept expanding.
In 1869, the school by this time already in the hands
of Perel's son-in-law a man by the name of Vul'f,
filed a complete yearly report with the Rabbinical Seminary.
At that point, the school day run from 9 to 12:45,
Sunday through Thursday, shorter day on Friday.
Languages remained at that point central to the curriculum
but Yiddish has been dropped and students in the first
through thirds classes had religion twice a week
and Russian four times a week.
I don't have his curriculum from the very first opening from 1830,
but even in this period from the 1850s
through the 1860s we see a gradual expansion of the number of classes.
The times the courses met per week.
The school is becoming more serious educationally.
Other changes, there was a brief period when he taught Polish.
That became quite politically unpopular quickly
and there were couple of other Jewish schools that also schools
for girls that taught Polish over the years.
But by 1861 the second Polish uprising
that was clearly out of the question.
Yiddish also disappears from the curriculum fairly early.
Perel did not Hebrew but almost every other private school
for Jewish girls opened after 1850 and that's
when most of them were opened.
His is quite early and then there's a trickle of them afterward
and really after 1850 they start opening in larger numbers.
Almost all of those taught Hebrew to the girls.
[ Pause ]
>> Russian was the mainstay of the curriculum in his school and in all
of the other ones, the course that met most frequently.
The course usually second under that hat met the most times per week was
religion, not so much in Perel school.
Not, not-- it didn't meet that often
and it didn't meet in all the classes.
But in most of the other schools religion also met everyday
or at least four days a week.
Obviously, religion had to be taught in these schools.
They were Jewish schools but there wasn't much for precedent to go
on for how religion ought to be taught.
>> Judaism in two hours a week,
even in four hour a week hadn't really been done before,
certainly not in the Tsarist Empire.
The heder was all religion all the time.
It was nothing but religion so how to take out what is central
to Judaism and teach it only a few hours a week?
Perel himself as well as the other educators who followed him relied
on German language textbooks in the early years.
That is the modern schools for Jewish children boys and girls
in the German speaking lands and they were able
to bring in those textbooks.
They pass through the sensor, successfully most of them,
and used those at first to teach religion
in their new Jewish schools in Russia.
Later on they began to write their own textbooks
and this is the front piece of, it had two sides.
It opens on a Russian side and on the Hebrew side
of a religion textbook created by Lazar Berman who was a,
first he run a private school for Jewish girls in the Lithuanian area
of Dubno and then he was, he went to St. Petersburg where he was asked
to run a private school for Jewish boys
and his wife Anna Berman run a parallel school for Jewish girls
in the capital, in Petersburg for many years.
And this, while he was working there this is the textbook he created,
Osnovyi Moiseeva zakona, which was quite widely used
The books employed in these schools tended to offer, and this is true
of both the German language ones and later the Russian language ones,
it tended to fall in to two camps.
That is either they offered a condensed version of sacred history
that is the Bible but a shortened version with just a good bits,
just a bit that were considered to be important rather
than all of the historical text.
And then the other model was more like a catechism,
a sort of statement of faith based on either traditional sources,
Maimonides principles sometimes the 10 Commandments
or sometimes written expressly for this purpose of teaching
and the creation of the teacher's themselves.
Jewish girls were also taught the rudiments of prayer in all
of the schools that I have examined.
And this I think is an interesting combination
because the textbooks are fairly new.
They have a more rationalist approach to Judaism.
They're teaching a more modern enlightened idea
of what the religion is about.
But on the other hand, teaching Jewish girls prayer is
about the most traditional possible way
of preparing them for their futures.
In so far as we can understand what happened in Jewish homes,
in the traditional Jewish home during this period
where there wasn't formal education offered, Jewish girls were taught
by family members to read the prayer book.
That was considered to be an important task as well
as to run a kosher kitchen.
It was among the things that Jewish girls needed to know.
So, in these schools that are in some ways so cutting edge
and so modern there's also this sort of recognition that the people
who they're teaching are maybe not so modern themselves
and that nobody wants to send to their daughter to a Jewish school
and have her comeback not knowing her prayers.
That's the whole point to a certain degree
of what these families could imagine.
And so we see the sort of the modernizing efforts
but also the degree to which those where held in check
by the communities in which they functioned.
You may be wondering at this point who taught in these schools?
Was Perel fairly typical or are we looking
at other types of educational models?
Perel was not entirely typical.
That is, he was in the sense that all of these teachers had
to be Russian speaking in order to legally open a private school
for Jewish girls and I can only look at the ones that were legal
because the illegal ones aren't on the books.
I don't-- their correspondence is in the ministry of education files.
One had to know Russian.
One had to be able to correspond with the government in Russian.
So in that sense these people could not function entirely
within the Yiddish speaking Jewish community.
They have to step outside to some degree and learn Russian.
But many of them tended to be much more self-educated in knowledge
of secular subjects in Russian than Perel was that hat not
to have gone to the gymnasium.   This table shows a little bit
about what we can know about the educators.
Most of them were men.
This is I think not surprising at all.
Of those men, of those 94 or so men who opened private schools
for Jewish girls, and really I don't know enough information to talk
about all the teachers whom they hired.
I can talk about the principals 'cause I have some information
on them.
But most of these principals taught--
some of the subjects in their schools they didn't teach all
of them but I simply can't know about all the people they hired.
So this is the principals.
Of those men, approximately half of them also taught
in government sponsored Jewish schools, schools for Jewish boys.
Also a number of them, 9 or 10 were government rabbis.
So these were people who had had some secular education
who aligned themselves to some degree with the Russian government
who were employed by the Russian government,
oftentimes before they open these private schools for Jewish girls
and had to already be functional in Russian.
The other half of the men hard to know exactly
where their education came from,
they don't have specific credentials written down but they managed.
A lot of them don't write very good Russian.
But that's, actually, better for me.
That's much easier to read in some ways except
if their handwriting is poor.
More surprising, I think, is the number of women.
It looked approximately a third, a fourth of the educators
who opened private schools for private girls were women.
Of those women, as you can see, most were Jewish women
and a pretty significant proportion were non-Jews.
That's much less true of the men.
There is one non-Jewish man, pretty much statistically insignificant,
a much larger number of Jewish women.
And briefly, I would say about that
that there were far fewer educational opportunities,
a professional opportunities for any women, educated women,
in the Pale of Settlement all the more so for Jewish women but also
for non-Jews and so, for some of them, particularly in areas
with very high concentration of Jews, this was a good option.
Big cities often had a gymnasium for women
and several private finishing schools.
Graduates of these programs, if they did not immediately marry
and leave the workforce, could hoped to get a job in one
of the same schools that they've gone to.
If they were unable to do so, they had very few other options.
Suddenly though after 1831, there's this additional option
of opening a private school for Jewish girls.
Some enterprising non-Jewish women realized
that they not only had the skills to run such schools but that
in many ways their religious
and educational backgrounds actually provided a cache of sorts.
Wealthy Jewish families often wanted their daughters
to receive a truly formal European education.
What better way to do so than in a school run
by a European educated Russian woman but with religion, of course,
taught by a local Jew whom she would hire.
Alright, a few thoughts on students now.
Who were in fact the families
who sent their daughters to these schools?
Where they all from the wealthy elite as somewhat suggested
in the case of this non-Jewish educators and also
in Perel himself opening that first school?
In Perel school in 1869 the age ranged of students was from 8 t 15,
the majority were between 9 and 13.
In that year, of his 85 students, 58 were members of the urban estate
and 27 came from merchant families.
Several years later or earlier in the 1861, of his 77 pupils,
12 were the daughters of merchants and 65 of townspeople.
The estates are not really coterminous with class.
It's hard to talk about class in late 19th century Russia
but basically the merchants were the elite
of the Jewish community, the merchant estate.
And in-- even in Perel school in Vilna
where there was some serious wealth,
the majority of his students are not coming from merchant families.
They're from the towns estate families
who wasn't exactly a middle class but could be quite a range in terms
of how much expendable income they had.
In this Perel's distribution is similar to his successor schools.
Many of the founding principals thought
that they could attract mainly the daughters of the wealthy elite
and that their schools would be well funded.
>> What they found out was the reality was they were inundated
with applicants who didn't necessarily have enough funds
to attend those schools but very much wanted an education.
And I'm gonna talk a little bit about funding in a moment,
but just another couple of words about distribution.
The distribution within the classes was also quite uneven.
So in 1861, for example, there were 36 girls in the preparatory class,
the lowest class in Perel school, 22 in the first class and 9
and 10 respectively in the second and highest or third class.
There was also a great deal of turnover in these schools.
In January of 1869, for example,
there were 50 girls enrolled in Perel school.
Over the course of that calendar year,
75 more enrolled and another 40 left.
And this is fairly typical.
In 1869, the school could boast of no graduates.
However, eight students left the school in order to study
at other local secondary schools.   So what do we make of this?
I'd say there were two major reasons for all this turnover
and for the heavy concentration at the bottom.
Firstly, girls left because their families could no longer afford
the tuition.
Education is-- a paying tuition for education
for a girl was still a luxury and families who were
in tough financial times as many Jewish families were,
particularly as the 19th century where on or had to move suddenly,
often had to give up on an education,
a formal education for their daughters.
On the other hand, many families clearly came into these schools
in order to use them as stepping stones
to more prestigious Russian schools.
That is, their children didn't know Russian.
They themselves couldn't teach them in the home so they put them
for a couple of years in Perel school or one
of the other schools just until they knew enough to pass in to one
of the secondary schools where they could get a truly fine education.
And this leads me back to the initial question I asked
about where these girls, these girls who went to Perel school
for a couple of years and then went on to a gymnasium, are these some
of the girls who later went on to become revolutionaries?
To become Bundist?
Zionist? To become activists or leaders in some other way?
Jewish women were fairly small percentage of Bolsheviks although
over represented, larger in the Menshevik party,
quite active in Zionist movement and they formed over 40 percent
of leadership in the Bund and this is a picture of a Bundist group
in Grodno around 1907 and you see many women present
in the Jewish Labour Bund.
These women were literate in Yiddish, often in Russian as well
as other European languages.
Did they go to Perel school or other schools in order to get there?
Unfortunately, it turns out to be very hard to know.
A few went on to be teachers and those ones I can trace.
For example, Perel's daughter Flora graduated from her father's school,
went on to get a secondary education and then return
to his school teaching French and Russian for many years
and her husband became the principal after her father retired.
So they went on to run the school together for another couple decades.
And there are some other examples of girls who went on to be teachers.
It's much harder to trace an exact line
between these other more famous types and the school girls.
One reason is that, if you've ever read an Autobiography
by Revolutionary the sort of format of the genre requires a dismissal
of the past and of whatever school system and family one came from.
Revolutionaries have to show, having read many they tend
to be fairy formulaic that an early age they realize
that there injustice around them, in their homes,
in their communities and thus they left.
They went on.
They don't typically talk about what a great foundational education they
had before they, you know, went on and discovered politics later on.
So, I haven't been able to yet,
I'm still hoping, to make any direct ties.
I have made some direct ties between women who went
on to get a higher education and the Jewish were also
over represented in these groups.
There were about 100 women studying, Russian women studying
in Switzerland in 1870 when they were recalled and told
that they wouldn't be able to retain their Russian citizenship
if they didn't comeback.   About 30 of them were Jews.
Also there were periodic attempts at higher education in Petersburg,
in [inaudible] and elsewhere over the course of the late 19th century
and there again many Jewish women involved and some
of them have been able to show started in these schools.
A few words about economic of the schools, something I didn't go
in to this project with the slightest bit of interest in
but it actually turned out to be quite informative
and I hope you'll find it so also.
Perel, Shevel Perel was an innovator not only in his decision
to open the school and in terms of his curriculum, but also in the ways
in which he kept his school open for so many years.
By 1843, Perel had managed to obtain a yearly subsidy
from the government.
He got on very well with local and national authorities and he kept
up a constant stream of funding request over the course
of his many years as principal.
It seems that he was able to use the favorable impression gathered
by Lilienthal, Max Lilienthal, who visited the school in 1843
to get that initial subsidy.
Later on, that subsidy moved from the korobka,
the meat tax, to the candle tax.   And in 1850 when Perel thought--
start to expand his school he requested additional funding
from the candle tax.
At this time, there was no other girl school receiving money
from a candle tax funds.
The candle tax funds were actually devised in order
to fund the estate sponsored school system for Jewish boys
which was founded in 1844 as a means
to make the Jews Russian and less different.
So, the Jews were funded to pay for the school system
to change them and, but the schools didn't turn out to be all
that popular or all that successful and some
of the money was just sitting around.
And essentially, Perel figured that out and words spread quickly.
So that within the next few years somehow,
and I don't know how they all knew about this,
everyone else who opened a school
for Jewish girls was also requesting extra funding
from the candle tax funds.
In addition to that, they used tuition fee scales to the advantage
of the school and this, I think,
is still widely practiced in private schools.
The flat tuition rate in 1854 for Perel school was 10 rubles per year,
fairly modest, a little more than a heder
but not a huge amount of money.
However, he also offered supplementary courses as I mentioned
in crafts, dance and music for an additional 50 rubles,
couple afternoons a week.
And the students could eat meals at the school
for an additional 150 rubles.
This rather unbalanced collection of options allowed him
to simultaneously obtain as much money as possible
from the wealthy families and make it possible for families
of limited means to send their daughters to the schools.
He was effectively creating subsidies from the rich to the poor.
Other educators followed Perel's lead in both of these ways.
By the 1860s, everyone who opened a school requested candle tax funds
and Perel's savvy use of tuition scales was also emulated elsewhere.
Okay. So, it's a nice story.   Shevel Perel took a chance.
He opened a private school for Jewish girls in 1831.
By 1881 there were over a hundred of them.
His school was still going strong although he was no longer living.
Over the course of his life he received many honors.
He was granted honorary citizenship,
quite a high regard from the government.
In 1858 the Minister of Education himself visited Perel school.
But beyond his personal triumph or the existence of a hundred
or so schools, what does this really teach us?
I wanna begin by using geography as a metaphor.
Something of the nature of Perel's vision and the degree of change
over 50 years can be discerned
in examining the location of this school.
Perel opened his new school on the street in Vilna referred
to as Daytsche gas by the Jews or Nemetskaia ulitsa by the Russians.
Obviously, it was where the Germans, had been the German neighborhood.
Until the first decade of the 19th century Daytsche gas was the outer
edge of what was a contained Jewish community.
>> The Jews all lived on the other side of Daytsche gas.
As of the first decade of the 19th century Jews were allowed
to move beyond that border and Perel put his school right there
on Daytsche gas.
I like to think that it's meaningful.
Maybe that was just the only building he could find to rent.
The school existed at the very border of the Jewish community
and the non-Jewish one representing the cutting edge of education
and of the possibility of interaction
between Jews and their neighbors.
By the end of the period of study by the 1880s,
Daytsche gas like the school itself had become
on the central thoroughfare of what was now an expanded
and entirely mixed Jewish community.   Jews had moved well beyond.
Non-Jews had moved into this area and it was-- Vilna had become mixed.
What I'm trying to suggest here is
that Perel School was not only the happy beneficiary of changes
in the Jewish community of his day,
but it was also an active participant in those changes.
Perel School had become normative
because Daytsche gas was no longer a liminal border land
but now a mixed bit space but by the same token.
Part of the transformation of the street must be understood
as a result of the work of his school and others.
The history of education has too often been viewed illustrative.
Historians write about changes in communities in which they study
and they use schools as an example.
Look, you can see that something has changed
because the school is teaching a different subject.
What is often not recognized is the causative nature
of the educational institutions themselves.
It should be obvious.
We know the role that education has played in our lives and the lives
of our near and dear ones, yet most historians have not granted it the
status as an agent of change.
In this work I try to demonstrate the role of education
in the transformation of the Jewish community in Tsarist Russia.
And I'm not gonna be able to go in to that entire argument here,
but I wanna close with two examples of how that works.
As I mentioned the schools opened in the 1850s and afterward
that private schools for Jewish girls all offered Hebrew
to the girls.
But these were the only schools in the Tsarist Empire
of that period teaching Hebrew as a language, that is in the heder.
Jewish boys learned a formulaic translation
of the Hebrew biblical text into Yiddish
but they weren't actually struggling to do that translation themselves.
They were memorizing it.
And in the government schools for Jewish boys, Hebrew was not taught.
There were no private schools for Jewish boys up until the 1870s
because until the government schools closed they weren't going
to allow their competition to open up legally so the only place
that Hebrew was being taught as a modern language was
in these private schools for Jewish girls
and there were textbooks created.
Again, in order to facilitate that they had to work
from scratch in order to do so.
Now, at the turn of the century, with the advent of Zionism,
there began to appear explicitly Zionist schools.
This is a picture, a photograph of heder [inaudible] which is one
of the ways in which Zionism taking over these charity schools,
tried to teach about Zionism and Hebrew language
and Jewish culture to students.
Hebrew was a central subject in all of these schools
and they became very popular and much has been written about them.
Most of it claiming that it was entirely new,
that [inaudible] the teaching Hebrew in Hebrew but teaching Hebrew
at all was invented in these schools.
In fact, they were using not only textbooks but techniques developed
in these private schools for Jewish girls.
They were like educational institutions learning
from others who came before them.
But that mostly isn't recognized partly because there's been
so little scholarship on these schools but also because it's part
of the Zionist narrative to come from nothing and be new
and innovative in that way.
Secondly, one other example, when I tell people,
particularly orthodox Jews, that I study education for Jewish girls
in 19th century Russia the inevitably say, "Oh,
you mean like Sarah Schenirer?"
And I say, "No, actually she taught girls in 20th century Poland.
That's different story.
But over the years of answering this question many times I have actually
come to see that there is a link between Sarah Schenirer
and the Bais Yaakov movement and between these schools.
And it goes as follows.
The story told about the Bais Yaakov movement was that Sarah Schenirer,
this humble Hasidic seamstress,
sort of out of the blue came up with this idea.
She spent the war, the First World War Vienna,
she heard preaching there
and she realized there should education for Jewish girl.
So she want back to her native Krakow after World War I
and she opened this school system for Jewish girls,
for orthodox Jewish girls, and she was able to gain the support
of the rabbinic leaders of her era because they realized
that Jewish girls were going to Catholic schools,
were going to Polish schools and were disappearing from the faith
and if they didn't do something about it, there wouldn't be anyone
for the yeshiva bochers to marry.
But the part of the story that doesn't get told is why?
Why were the orthodox Jewish girls
or any Jewish girls go into Catholic schools?
Why were they go into Polish schools?
Who said that they could?
And I think that part of the answer goes back to the schools.
That the emergence of this private schools for Jewish that allow them
to learn the language of the land and allow them to get
into Russian schools made it possible philosophically as well
as just logistically for Jewish girls to begin to attend secular
or at least non-Jewish educational institutions.
[ Pause ]
>> So those are just two examples that I have.
I could go in to more of the lasting
and fairly unknown contributions of these schools.
There is not enough information at present
to definitively link the 20th century, late 19th century radicals
to these schools but, nonetheless, it's very clear that every girl,
and there were thousands and thousands of them, I tried to work
on numbers and its impossible to get an exact number given
that the schools opened and closed and they didn't always--
their information didn't always reach the ministry of education,
but over 10,000, over 40,000, hard to say exactly how many.
All of these girls went home.
And if they went for 1 year to the these schools,
if they went for 5 years to these schools, if they--
these schools allowed them to go to another school afterward,
they went home with their knowledge of Russian.
They went home with their knowledge of new approaches
to the Jewish religion and they brought those
into the Jewish home and, certainly
in that sense the schools have also had a lasting effect
and I think are important to bring back
in to the narrative of this period.   [ Applause ]
>> I think we have time for some question so.
Yes please.
>> Yes, a brief comment and then a question.
Brief comment, my mother went to Russian school
in Tsarist Russian just before the Bolshevik Revolution
and she did come from a religious home but she didn't know how
to read Hebrew and [inaudible] spoke Yiddish.
That's in 1960.
My question is, after the assassination of Alexander II,
what did Alexander III that who was so anti-Semitic,
did he close the Jew schools?   >> Yes, thank you for your comment.
I'll be interested to hear how she managed in a Russian school,
but to answer you question.
There were series of laws meant to hold--
so first in 1844 the Tsar wants the Jews to become more Russian
and enter Russian culture.
After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II,
the tide turned the other way and there's all sorts of efforts
to pull Jews out of the profession, out of education.
The May Laws, they temporary laws,
there are whole series of laws that follow.
They did not close private educational institutions.
What they did was limit Jewish access to public, well,
they weren't exactly public, but to Russian educational institutions
but they only did so for boys.
So Jewish boys were limited at 5 percent in the capital,
10 percent in the Pale, it varied a little bit from place to place
of the school population of any of this given schools.
But girls where not on the books anywhere so there are years
in which there are, you know, 9.9 percent Jewish boys, for example,
in a gymnasium in Odessa and there are 13 percent
of Jewish girls there.
Sometimes they were limited de facto.
The principals chose not to let them come to those Russians schools
but it wasn't legally enforced.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Thank you.   Please.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Oh, yes.
Thank you for asking that.
I-- [laughs] there's always so much to say.
It's hard to get out an answer.
I use a lot of quotes from the educators
when I have any quotes from them.
And when I submitted this to for publication one of the comments,
with an extremely straight boring title, one of the comments
of the publisher and one of the reader was, "Why don't you take one
of those beautiful quotes and make it in to your title?"
So the full quote is actually
in their hands lies the future of the next generation.
And it's from a teacher by the name of [inaudible] who had a school
in [inaudible] and he gave a number of public speeches
which were published in the local papers on the occasion
of the opening of his school and at the 10th anniversary of his school.
And so that the speech is just a brief sort of remembrance of him
and I explained it in the introduction.
>> Thanks.   >> Yes.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Great question.
Nobody wanted to learn Yiddish.
Yiddish was a very dclass language so I think that it made sense
to Perel when he opened his school, oh,
Jewish girls speak Yiddish we teach them Yiddish.
But that quickly went out of fashion and none
of the other schools went in that direction.
Yiddish sort of had a rebirth of sorts in later on.
I do think that these schools also, and I talked about this in the book,
did contribute to some of the Yiddish schools particularly
in their focus on crafts, but that's another question.
In terms of your question, the-- why Hebrew?
I don't exactly why Hebrew.
But languages were certainly central to these schools.
Often between French and German and Russian, you know, math once a week.
They were all about languages so maybe it just made sense
that as long as you're teaching languages.
There are some schools where they specifically say
that they're just teaching Hebrew reading.
That is they teach French grammar, Russian grammar,
German grammar and Hebrew reading.   But overtime, more and more
of the schools ones they're teaching all those other languages they begin
to teach Hebrew as well.
But I don't-- I haven't seen it written anywhere
in justification or explanation.   [ Pause ]
>> Yes.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Uhm, yeah.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Oh, yes and I was supposed to do that all along, sorry.
Repeat the question.   Did Perel himself have daughters?
Yes. He had four daughters and two sons.
And could that be one of his motivations?
Certainly, it could be.
There's lengthy correspondence to Judah Leib Gordon
who is a Hebrew poet but who also run two different private schools
for Jewish girls later on in the 1860s.
Interestingly, was very concerned about the education of his daughters
and was writing all over the country in his correspondence trying
to find tutors for his daughters
that they should reach a very high level of education
but he didn't think his school was enough.
He wanted his daughters to go on from there
and get a better Hebrew education.
So that might have certainly answered one question
but it didn't solve all of their problems.
Yes, please.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> The illustration that's on the cover
of your book is very arresting.   But it looks to me that it is more
from the post Tsarist era than the Tsarist era.
>> Yes.   >> Where is the illustration from?
>> Yes, it's from a 1912, it's from a 1912 celebration
of a 25th anniversary of a Jewish girl school.
So, yes, it is-- it's a great picture
but it shows a later period of art and design.
But it's from a pamphlet that I found in YIVO
and just loved the image.   Please.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Yes.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Oh, absolutely there were.
Yes and I would, thank you.
Other experiments of Jewish education in Poland, German land,
elsewhere absolutely yes.
And in both of those cases, both Poland
and in the German speaking land they were ahead of Tsarist Russia.
They started earlier.
Germany really started already in the 18th century
with some modern private schools and Poland the sort
of rump Polish Congress Kingdom
which was left was administered differently
and actually they were able
to open private schools a little bit earlier.
So that is to say, yes there were some other examples to drop on.
But it's interesting; they don't talk about them very much.
A lot of the educators talk about Perel.
That is, when they write into the government they say,
we wanna have a school just like Shevel Perel.
But they don't say, just like those great schools in the German land
or in Poland which you might know about and be interested in also.
So I think they were aware of those schools.
They were certainly using some of their textbooks
but they were also really doing something new and something
that was appropriate to their own setting.
They couldn't draw in those schools entirely.
What distinguishes the schools--   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> So, a lot of, that's a big question.
What distinguishes the schools in say Germany or what was left
of Poland to these Russian schools?
The religious environment in which the german schools
where opening was very different.
The expectations of what could be taught,
how it could be taught they were functioning in communities
that were looking for modern approaches, to Judaism in a way
that the Russian Jewish [inaudible] wasn't so much.
The educators were more sort of in line and with the communities
in which they were working there.
The estate was also to some degree financing
but certainly supporting those Jewish schools in the German lands,
in the Austrian Empire also whereas these schools were,
yes they did manage to sort of scrape by on some estate funding
but it was very much in a backward way.
They weren't estate schools to any degree.
They were very-- in much more grassroots and that also meant
that they are more different one from another in terms of the hours
of study, in terms of the subjects of study.
There wasn't any-- there was very little oversight in these schools.
It seems like I have sort of two examples from this whole period
of schools being close down.
So maybe an instruct, you know, an inspector came once every few years.
But that's part of an answer to a big question.
Yes, please.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes. Jewish opposition
to the school is the question and a good question.
Not as much as you might think.
Perel does complain in his correspondence about being hounded
by certain members of the, from the Jewish community.
And apparently, his son was even illegally taken in to the military
when he shouldn't have been eligible because he graduated from gymnasium
which is not, probably had nothing to do with Perel son and everything
to do with his father being this prominent educator
in the modern school for Jewish girls.
That said these schools opened all over the place, in the heartland
So, there may have been some opposition but I think
that the schools managed to function
in the communities in which they lived.
They knew how far they could go, these educators,
and they didn't push beyond that.
The schools to the modern look very traditional
in many ways except for-- even in a way
that religion was taught they look very old fashioned.
But they were very proper institutions in many ways
and there's not a lot of public opposition.
There is writing about them.
There's an awareness of these schools and there's an awareness
that they are part of the modern camp, part of the progressive camp
within the Jewish community.
But at the same time I think there wasn't as much polarization
within the Jewish community as there would be by the 20th century
and many family saw the clear advantages.
A girl who had a year of math and Russian under her belt would be
so much more useful in the family business than one who didn't.
That it was, I think to a lot of families,
it was a pretty easy choice.   [ Silence ]
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Yes, absolutely.
French was the language of high culture in Russia
and it also gave them access to a lot of literature.
And the girls-- one of the thing actually in terms
of [inaudible] question also to the degree
that there's opposition is some, there begin to be some complaints
about Jewish women and their reading habits,
sitting around reading Schiller [phonetic] in particular,
a lot of writing about Jewish girls just wasting their time reading
these romances by Schiller.
So that's not a very strong opposition but it's an awareness
that this is opening up new worlds to these girls to some degree.
[ Silence ]   >> Thank you very much.
I just want to remind you that there are books back there
if you're interested.
I'm sure Dr. Adler will be happy to sign them if you want
and we look forward to seeing you again at our next program.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]   [ Silence ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.