The National-Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley
Daniel J. Elazar
The arrival of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews on
American shores in the 1880s coincided with the heyday of the
idea of the Mississippi Valley as an integral region -- the very
heartland of the United States, the "real America" and the
definer of the American spirit and way of life. The Mississippi
Valley was a product of the nineteenth century. Even the eastern fringes of the vast territory
from the Appalachians to the Rockies had hardly emerged from its
frontier stage by 1880. The middle portions were principally
populated by the sons and daughters of the pioneers and the
region's western third was still being settled.
Jews had settled in the eastern half of the region during its
first generation of settlement and were among the first settlers
of the western half. Hence, though the region's Jewish population
represented only 20 percent of American Jewry and, with the
exception of a few major cities, was to remain relatively small
even after the great migration, it did contain hundreds of
thousands of Jews. Those Jews Americanized quickly throughout
most of the region. In some places, like New Orleans, successive
communities assimilated almost entirely. In others,
like St. Paul, Jews remained separate yet integrated into the
best clubs (Plaut 1959). In some, like Chicago, they went through
the complete urban immigrant experience of the kind that has
become the basic stereotype of American Jewish folklore. In some, like Denver, they were among the very
first pioneers, yet at the same time some of them actually
reproduced an American version of an Eastern European shtetl,
complete with cows, goats and truck gardens. In
some, like Minneapolis, Jews were relatively separated as a group
and even confronted considerable "genteel" anti-Semitism, while a
small number of Jews created so vibrant a Jewish community that
to this day it stands out from the norm of American Jewish
demographics (Gordon 1949, Kramer and Leventman 1961).
Hebrew and the National-Cultural School
Generally unknown, and certainly unrecognized, in this pioneering
experience were the efforts of pioneer Hebraists and Hebrew
educators who introduced the study and teaching, speaking and
even writing of Hebrew in those communities. In the last
analysis, they did not succeed in developing an indigenous Hebrew
culture. No one really has succeeded in the United States in
developing a serious Hebraic culture and constituency. But they
succeeded as well as most, longer than many, and had a
significant impact on American Jewish life and culture.
Consequently they deserve to be included in any history of Hebrew
in America.
What was characteristic or common for all of these Hebrew
educators was their strong commitment to the national-cultural
view of Jewish history and peoplehood, and consequently of the
purpose and content of Jewish education. In a
very real sense, the champions of Hebrew education in the
Mississippi Valley were maskilim or the students of maskilim.
Virtually all of them were born in the Old World, most in Europe
but a few in Eretz Israel. While we do not have figures at this
point, it seems that the majority were Litvaks and indeed it was
in the cities with heavy Litvak settlement that Hebrew education
was most successful. As maskilim they were educated to see
Hebrew as essential to Jewish peoplehood and culture -- as they
would put it, to Jewish national existence. For most of them the
study of Hebrew language and literature plus history replaced
traditional Jewish textual study as the foundation for survival
and what we would today call Jewish identity (a term that arose
only after Jews ceased to feel their Jewishness in an
unselfconscious way).
Almost to a person they were Zionists, seeing the national-
cultural movement as integrally bound up with the restoration of
Jewish national existence in Eretz Israel. In this respect they
shared a common culture and orientation with their brethren who
were involved in reviving the Hebrew language and culture in
Eretz Israel at the same time. Indeed, many of the Jewish
educators on both sides of the ocean had studied in the same
schools in Eastern Europe or Eretz Israel and with the same
teachers. (Even at the time, the presence of Eretz Israel
natives in the Mississippi Valley educational community was of no
little importance.)
In a sense, the national-cultural approach can be summed up as
the head of a yeshiva in Detroit described it to the
superintendent of the United Hebrew Schools in that city in the
1950s: "You represent hochmat Yisrael whereas I represent Torat
Yisrael" (Albert Elazar, personal interview). Needless to say,
the national-cultural school would not have accepted their
exclusion from Torat Yisrael, but at the same time they did
emphasize hochmat Yisrael.
In the American context, the national-cultural approach must be
distinguished from the two other significant approaches to Jewish
education in the twentieth century United States. One, the emphasis on the study of
traditional texts in yeshivot katanot and in the more traditional
Orthodox day schools, which was hardly present in the Mississippi
Valley prior to the 1960s, and the other, the emphasis on
synagogue skills, customs and ceremonies, and Jewish identity
common to the non-Orthodox congregational schools, which became
dominant in the region from the 1940s onward. The
national-cultural approach was communal in its fundamental
orientation, looking to strengthen clal Yisrael and rejecting
efforts at denominational fragmentation. It was Hebraic. It was
oriented toward the teaching of history, language and literature
as the fundaments of Jewish culture.
The Communal Talmud Torah
The communal Talmud Torah was the unique creation of the
national-cultural school. Taking an institution which in the
Ashkenazic Old World was primarily for the education of poor boys
(as distinct from the Sephardic world where it was the principal
educational institution) whose name had a very distinguished
pedigree going back to Mishnaic times, they built a new style
clal Yisrael-oriented school organized in the name of the
community and supported by it. A principal feature of the Talmud
Torah was its existence as an independent educational
institution, headed and staffed by professional educators and
dedicated to modern methods of pedagogy. Not every Talmud Torah
achieved this ideal; qualified personnel were few and communities
not necessarily forthcoming. But a significant number came
close.
The Talmud Torah was an intensive supplementary school fostered
by a generation that believed fervently in the public schools as
vehicles to foster the equality of Jews in the United States. In
other words, the same people who pressed so hard for
national-cultural education believe with equal fervency in the
American vision and the American dream. Mordecai Kaplan was to
give an American voice to their striving to create Jews who could
live fully in two civilizations. Thus they
did not seek to build day schools. Only one segment of the
Orthodox community sought to do so at that time. Outside of
Chicago there were almost no day schools in the Mississippi
Valley until the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The Talmud Torah provided intensive supplementary education,
often ten hours a week, on Sunday morning plus Monday through
Thursday in the afternoon or evening. The better Talmud Torahs
promoted school-related activities in the form of clubs and other
informal educational activities. For example, the Minneapolis
Talmud Torah organized an alumni association after its first
graduating class which became an extremely cohesive group,
holding annual reunions to this day. The more Hebrew-oriented
alumni founded the Da'as group, a Hebrew-oriented club which
continued to meet until the 1970s. In the following generation,
a hug ivri was established for the younger Hebrew-speakers, which
functioned in the 1950s and 1960s. Hebrew-speaking groups like
this were founded in a number of communities. In Detroit the
group was called the Kvutzah Ivrit and drew heavily on alumni of
the United Hebrew Schools. For a number of years it published a
Hebrew review, Hed Hakvutzah. The review survived some twenty
years (1940-early 1960s) and over twenty issues were published.
The group "aspired to maintain a living Hebrew movement in
Detroit" (Hed Hakvutzah, title page 1959).
In the days when Jewish scholars functioned within the Jewish
community, Talmud Torah faculties often included people of
considerable scholarly ability who in another generation would
have been professors of Jewish studies. Hence there was even a
modest output of scholarship on the part of Talmud Torah faculty
members.
While never dominant in terms of enrollment, the Talmud Torah
became the normative institution for Jewish education in the
United States for the first four decades of the twentieth
century, losing that position in the late 1940s. With its decline
came a serious decline in the number of hours devoted in Jewish
education. The weekly norm for the congregational schools was
four to six hours on two or three days.
Those who sought to replace the Talmud Torah with congregational
or day schools often attacked it as a "secular" institution. This
was very far from the truth since in fact part of the
national-cultural approach was to maintain Jewish tradition,
albeit in a non-Orthodox way. Traditional services and
observances were carefully maintained and in many cases it was
the alumni of the Talmud Torahs who founded the Conservative
synagogues in the 1920s. For example, the Talmud Torah alumni
who had been used to worshipping together while students in a
modern atmosphere where the traditional service was maintained
with new dignity, decorum, and understanding, continued to
worship together and in 1924 founded Beth El, which became the
leading Conservative congregation in Minneapolis. There was an
irony here in that it was the Conservative movement that came
into competition with the Talmud Torahs and led the assault on
them on behalf of congregational schools.
Not only was the Talmud Torah the major product of these
educators, the Talmud Torah flourished and reached its maximum
strength in the Mississippi Valley, especially in the smaller
Jewish communities of the Midwest: Superior, Wisconsin;
Indianapolis, Indiana; Omaha, Nebraska; Akron, Dayton, Columbus,
Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio; Minneapolis and St. Paul,
Minnesota; and Detroit, Michigan. This was true as late as the
1970s. Where the Talmud Torah survived in the postwar generation
as more than a fossil remnant, it was in the same medium-sized
and smaller Jewish communities of the Mississippi Valley in which
it had flourished earlier. Of the thirteen cities mentioned by
Leon Spotts in his 1974 paper, eight were in the Mississippi
Valley and they were by far the eight strongest on the list
(Spotts 1974).
Internal and External Struggles
The struggle confronting these Talmud Torahs was two-fold. The
first was a struggle between traditionalists and modernists among
the national-cultural school of educators themselves, whereby the
founding generation of the schools were firmly wedded to
introducing and maintaining the Ivrit b'Ivrit method then
becoming popular in the Eastern European schools that were
nominally counterparts to the Talmud Torahs but were actually
comprehensive all-day schools. The educators who came half a
generation later saw this emphasis on Ivrit b'Ivrit for all
subjects as stubbornness in the face of American realities where
American children could not learn the Hebrew language
sufficiently well in supplementary schools to be able to study
all subjects in Hebrew. The two groups overlapped for most of
the period in which the Talmud Torahs were important. This
struggle became a nearly permanent one until the end when reality
forced a decision in the direction of the younger group.
It was that second generation that often sought to change the
name of the school from Talmud Torah to Hebrew School or,
slightly later, to Community School. The former term reflected
the Hebraic ideology of the school and the latter its communal
ideology. Indeed, it was that generation that worked so hard to
secure Jewish community federation recognition and support for
the Talmud Torahs, in the most notable cases with considerable
success. In Detroit, for example, the United Hebrew Schools was
one of the six founding constituents of the Jewish Welfare
Federation in 1926.
The second struggle was between the dedicated men in the schools
themselves and the rising Jewish education establishment, mostly
concentrated in the big cities on the East Coast, many if not
most of them connected with the Jewish Theological Seminary and
its Teachers Institute. The latter functioned in larger and more
complex communities where no single set of schools could serve
the entire Jewish population, hence they took the position that
it did not matter under whose auspices the schools were as long
as they followed the programs that these educators wanted, which
were themselves varied. Thus they gave in early on to rabbinic
demands to establish congregational schools and other fissiparous
tendencies which may have been appropriate for their large cities
but which they insisted on trying to export to the smaller
communities of the Mississippi Valley in almost ideological
fashion.
Since these Eastern educators were the ones who came to be
recognized by the Eastern Jewish establishment as the "Jewish
educational statesmen," they had an advantage over the men in the
trenches. Among the educators themselves that advantage
diminished when it was noted that the people involved were far
removed from the classroom. Nevertheless, when called in by the
community leadership in the Mississippi Valley, often encouraged
by the new generation of American-trained rabbis, they frequently
had considerable influence against the Talmud Torahs.
This took on many of the characteristics of an East-West struggle
paralleling that in American society as a whole at the time. In
general, the people of the Mississippi Valley, both in the
Midwest and in the South, felt themselves treated as provincials
in the eyes of the East, if not actual colonies. They fought back
with a myth of special Midwestern and Southern virtue based upon
the agrarian foundations of both sections versus the teeming
urban ethnic industrial areas of the Seaboard. This view was
shared by Americans from across the political spectrum, from the
very conservative Colonel Robert McCormick and his Chicago
Tribune to the very progressive Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin.
Midwestern Jews especially fit in to this pattern. It was
reinforced by the realities of the East Coast-Midwest
relationship in Jewish as well as general matters. The struggle
between Eastern and Midwestern Jewish educators was real enough,
especially in the minds of the Midwesterners, who on one hand
wanted to help develop a countrywide Jewish education profession
and community, but on the other wanted to preserve their
particular institutional and professional frameworks.
The Midwest Federation of Hebrew Teachers
From the mid-1930s to World War II, the Midwest Federation of
Hebrew Teachers epitomized this struggle. Founded in 1934, its
first president was Dr. Shlomo Marenof, then in Chicago, a
Russian Jew who had spent a number of years in Palestine before
coming to the United States. His vice president and successor
was Albert Elazar, a native of Jerusalem, who came to teach
temporarily at the St. Paul Talmud Torah and stayed on once the
Depression made it almost impossible to return to Palestine.
Together with their colleagues, Marenof and Elazar developed the
first strong Hebrew teachers union in the United States, one
which sought to raise professional standards, provided placement
services from Niagara Falls to New Orleans and from Denver to
Pittsburgh, developed curricula materials, published a
professional journal, Bitaon, and fought for the adaptation of
the national-cultural approach to the American scene. At the
peak of its strength in the late 1930s it had a network of Jewish
educators from the Appalachains to the Great Plains, from Lake
Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, most connected with the Talmud
Torah movement.
The Midwest Federation of Hebrew Teachers was in constant
struggle with the great "names" in Jewish education at the time,
some of whom took positions in the Midwest at the new Bureaus of
Education which they fostered, that were essentially in
competition with the Talmud Torahs. At the same time the
Federation insisted on being part of the national organization
because its members' ideological goals were larger than regional.
Practically speaking, the coming of the war with its restrictions
on travel and nonlocal organizational activities put an end to
the Midwest Federation. In fact, what ended the Federation was
that its members rose from the ranks of being teachers to
becoming the educational administrators of the schools and
bureaus in the region. As such, they turned to confront a
different set of problems. Since the teachers who succeeded them
were far from having the same background and were mostly
part-time, they did not continue the struggle for a Jewish
education profession committed to Zionism and Hebrew.
At its height, the Midwest Federation of Hebrew Teachers began to
have influence with the Jewish community federations and other
community leaders as well. In Indianapolis, for example, Daniel
Frisch, who was very active in the Zionist Organization of
America and later became one of its most notable presidents,
actively supported Jewish education, and worked very closely with
the local Talmud Torah. In Omaha, Paul Veret, the principal of
the Talmud Torah, was also the executive director of the local
federation. He was a highly respected person in the community
and since Omaha was a small community, Jewish education was
directly under the wing of the federation, sharing professional
leadership.
Local Successes and Failures
What happened on the local scene was very much a product of
chance. For example, both Duluth, Minnesota and Superior,
Wisconsin, twin cities at the lakehead of Lake Superior, had
modestly-sized Jewish communities in those days, when the upper
midwestern iron ranges were booming and the twin ports had an
active commerce. Duluth was the larger of the two cities in both
general and Jewish population, but the best Talmud Torah was in
Superior, Wisconsin. That was because Louis Gordon, who later
spent most of his life as the educational director of the Talmud
Torah in St. Paul, started in Superior, Wisconsin when he came to
the United States. He went to St. Paul from Superior but he left
something behind. Indeed, from St. Paul he used to go to
Superior periodically to continue working with them and people
from Superior used to come to St. Paul to get his help.
The situation in Superior was unusual. Normally, Jewish
communities that small did not have enough children to maintain
schools with their own educators. Instead they sought an
individual who could be both a hazan and a Hebrew teacher,
sometimes seeking someone who could be a mohel and a shohet as
well.
The history of the St. Paul Talmud Torah was more typical. Its
antecedants can be traced back to the Capitol City Hebrew Free
School, founded as part of the Sons of Jacob Congregation in the
1890s. In its early years it met there and then later at the
Sons of Abraham. In 1912 it moved into its own building and
became an independent school. During World War I, the Temple of
Aaron, St. Paul's Conservative congregation, established a
congregational Talmud Torah and, in 1919, brought in Louis Gordon
from Superior, Wisconsin as a teacher. He became principal of
the Talmud Torah in 1921. In 1923 the first graduation was held.
In 1930 the Jewish Education Center building was completed. The
Temple of Aaron Hebrew School was transferred to it, detached
from the congregation, and renamed the St. Paul Talmud Torah.
The 1930s were its golden years. Its teachers at that time in
addition to Gordon included Albert Elazar, later to become
Superintendent of the United Hebrew Schools of Detroit, and
Zalesky, later to become the head of the Bureau of Jewish
Education in Cincinnati. The student body included people like
Marver Bernstein, who went on to become President of Brandeis
University; Midge Decter (nee Rosenthal), one of the leading
members of the New York intellectual establishment and wife of
Norman Podhoretz, whose strong Jewish interests have influenced
many in those circles; and Albert Vorspan, a major figure in the
Union of American Hebrew Congregations and champion of Jewish
social action, and his brother, Max, a leading figure at the Los
Angeles University of Judaism.
In 1956, following the westward movement of the Jewish community
to Highland Park, it moved into a new structure on the banks of
the Mississippi River, adjacent to Temple of Aaron. Since the
Orthodox community of St. Paul, which was concentrated on the
city's west side (actually the south bank of the Mississippi
River), maintained their own Westside Talmud Torah, and the
Reform families sent their children to Mt. Zion Sunday School,
the St. Paul Talmud Torah was generally identified with those
families that were neither Orthodox nor Reform, many of whom
affiliated with the Conservative movement over the years, but the
school was and has remained a community school.
Efforts to foster a Talmud Torah in Milwaukee ran into greater
difficulty. There were several abortive attempts around 1900 to
establish a proper Hebrew school but as late as 1923 "the number
of children taught in private chedarim and by melamdim at home
exceeds by far the number of children taught in established
schools" (as quoted in Swichkow and Gartner, 1963, p. 264, from
the Milwaukee Community Survey). Nevertheless, the Hebrew Free
School did develop into the Milwaukee Talmud Torah which was
essentially a bar mitzvah factory until 1915 when it moved into a
better building and Ephraim Lisitsky became its principal (1916).
At that time, the Federated Jewish Charities began to support the
school and it shifted to the Ivrit b'Ivrit method.
Lisitsky stayed only until 1918, when he moved to New Orleans.
After he departed, the school retrogressed to its former ways. A
community survey of 1923 showed an enrollment of 55 girls and 90
boys. On the basis of that survey the Federated Jewish Charities
agreed to take a more active interest and in 1925 took steps to
remedy the situation.
In the last analysis, the Talmud Torah never developed and the
congregations moved in to replace it. Still it tried to provide
ten hours of Jewish education a week to its students using the
Ivrit b'Ivrit method. Its best days were probably between 1925
and 1932 when Haim Margalit from Eretz Israel was principal. The
Federated Jewish Charities pressed for the founding of a Board of
Jewish Education in 1928 and Margalit became its director as
well. The Beth Israel School merged with the Talmud Torah but
the Board did not last. The Federated Jewish Charities helped
stabilize the school's finances until the Depression which
reduced its support and made it very difficult to collect
tuition.
The Talmud Torah was housed in Beth Israel Congregation until
1944 when it moved to the Northwest to keep up with the movement
of the Jewish population. In 1947 it merged with the Labor
Zionist Folkshule as United Hebrew School and in 1957 the
Workman's Circle School joined the union. Even with the union,
the communal schools slowly lost ground to Temple Beth El's
congregational school. In 1944 the Bureau of Jewish Education
was renewed with a full-time director, Meyer Galin, again with
the support of the Federation, now the Jewish Welfare Fund. The
Bureau opened an Eastside Hebrew School for the Jews in that
area.
The Minneapolis Talmud Torah and the United Hebrew Schools of
Detroit: Two Case Studies
The Minneapolis Talmud Torah offers one case study of the best of
the Hebrew national-cultural educational effort in the
Mississippi Valley and indeed in the United States. The Jewish
community in Minneapolis dates back to the 1870s. (Curiously,
the first known use of Hebrew in what is now Minneapolis was the
writing of a Hebrew-Dakotah dictionary by Presbyterian missionary
Gideon Pond in 1834 to make the Bible accessible to the Dakotah
or Sioux Indians living on the banks of Lake Calhoun.) In 1880
the community received an influx of Litvaks who settled on
Minneapolis' North Side. They brought with them a strong
commitment to Jewish learning. While the Jewish education system
that developed in Minneapolis was not entirely developed by
Litvaks, they unquestionably took the lead. Jewish education in
Minneapolis was also strengthened by the fact that the Reform
rabbi in the city, Dr. Samuel N. Deinard, a Litvak who had been
raised in Jerusalem, was also a strong supporter of intensive
Jewish education and actively participated in the establishment
of the Talmud Torah, unlike so many other Jewish communities
where the leadership of the Reform temple fought all efforts to
introduce Hebrew-based education on the grounds that it slowed
the acculturation of the immigrant generation (Gordon 1949, Plaut
1959).
In the fifteen years following the beginning of the Litvak
immigration a number of small chedarim were organized on a
private basis. From 1894, the best of these was taken under the
wing of the community leadership and named the Hebrew Free
School. The emerging community leadership came to the conclusion
that they wanted a more systematic and quality Jewish education
for the children of the community, one that would also be
appropriate to the American scene. So in 1911 it was reorganized
and in 1913 renamed the Talmud Torah.
The purpose of the Talmud Torah then as now was "to induct our
young into the spirit and contents of the Jewish heritage and to
prepare them for active and intelligent participation in Jewish
life" (as quoted in Nahshon 1974). In 1974, Samuel Nahshon, the
school's fifth executive director, described its character as
follows:
It is a community school for all Jewish children. It is a
supplementary school, uniquely suited to the needs of Jews
living in the open American society. From its inception, it
was rooted in the Hebraic and Zionist philosophy of Jewish
education, and stressed the intensive study of Jewish source
materials. In early decades the Talmud Torah was also the
main center of youth activities. The Talmud Torah of
Minneapolis has had an unusual number of outstanding Jewish
scholars and pedagogues on its faculty (Nahshon 1974).
Beginning in those early years and continuing to the present, the
Talmud Torah was organized into three divisions: a five-year
elementary course, a three-year high school course, and a
two-year Bet Midrash. Its curriculum was divided into five core
areas: Hebrew language and literature, Bible, the Jewish people,
Jewish thought, beliefs and practices, and rabbinics.
From the first the leadership of the school was in the hands of
an extraordinary individual, Dr. George J. Gordon. Dr. Gordon
was born in Neustadt, Lithuania in 1874 and educated at the Telz
Yeshiva. He came to the United States at the age of 18 and to
Minneapolis in 1893. In 1894, when he was twenty years old, he
convened a number of leading members of the North Side Jewish
community to try to improve on the heder system which was all
that existed in Minneapolis at the time. His intention was to
establish a school with better teachers and a more structured
curriculum. As he put it: "In addition to knowing what we didn't
like about the existing Hebrew schools, we also had a pretty fair
idea of what we really wanted to include in our curriculum. We
not only wanted our children to know their Bible and history, but
we wanted them to know the Hebrew language, to be able to use it
conversationally, to speak it naturally." It was too ambitious
an agenda for the beginning but they did secure a room on Fifth
Street North and brought in a Hebrew teacher from Fargo, North
Dakota, who was paid $40 a month by the community. Dr. Gordon
described him: "He really wasn't too good, but he was certainly
better than what we had had until that time."
In 1898 the premises of the school were transferred to the
Knesset Israel synagogue, the Litvak congregation. A new teacher
was secured and, with the help of the synagogue officials who
were also committed to Jewish education, the community built a
four-room building in the back of the synagogue. "Really good
teachers" were recruited and "some excellent results" were
reported. Classes met from 4 to 8 o'clock in the evening Monday
through Thursday for about an hour and a half per session.
Approximately 75 students were enrolled. Dr. Gordon was not
satisfied because he had to deal with too many people who opposed
the kind of program that he wanted to introduce, so in 1910 he
organized a revolt against the old Talmud Torah, using as its
basis the refusal of the school to pay a good teacher a better
salary. He swung enough popular support away from the old school
to establish a new school with most of the same people and the
old school simply disappeared. One of the principles of the new
school was that good teachers could only be had by paying good
salaries.
In February 1911, the new school, consisting of four classrooms,
was opened. Approximately 115 children were enrolled and a group
of North Side Jews who were themselves learned undertook
responsibility for soliciting funds from the members of the
community in order to keep the school in operation. The school
grew to 264 students by 1913 when its name was changed to the
Talmud Torah of Minneapolis. By 1914 their building was
overcrowded. They built a new building which they dedicated on
April 17, 1915 at the cost of $45,000. That same day the Talmud
Torah graduated its first class of 17 boys and 3 girls. An
alumni association was formed immediately. A high school
department was organized in 1916 and 6 students were graduated
from it in its first graduation in 1919. In 1920 the Bet
Hamidrash was established.
From the first, the school used the Ivrit b'Ivrit method and all
subjects were taught in Hebrew. Its classes met ten hours a day,
five days a week, eleven months of the year, a regimen that
lasted into the 1960s. The Talmud Torah followed the traditional
Jewish school year, beginning its terms in Hol Ha'Moed Sukkot and
Hol Ha'Moed Pesach.
In the interim, Dr. Gordon was trained as a medical doctor and he
engaged in medical practice for many years, but in 1929 he left
his medical practice to become the Educational Director of the
school. Before he died in 1944, he left an indelible stamp on the
community, one which endures to the present. Until the late
1970s, the voluntary leadership of the school were alumni who had
been influenced by his personality.
While Dr. Gordon is the legendary figure of the Minneapolis
Talmud Torah, in fact the principal who forged its character was
Elijah Avin, a Litvak (from the same family as Abba Eban) who
became one of the pioneer Hebrew educators in the United States.
Avin came to Minneapolis in 1911 to head the school as part of
the reorganization effort. He stayed until 1927 when he left the
community for California. Mar (Mr.) Avin, as he was known in the
school, was the one who first implemented what were then modern
methods of education, including a systematic course of study
entirely in Hebrew, and used the school to try to mold a new
generation of dignified Jews. He created the Talmud Torah
service whereby students came together on Sabbaths and holidays
to worship in their own environment in a decorous way, paying
special attention to the enunciation of the prayers in proper
Hebrew, the classical Ashkenazic developed in Eastern Europe at
that time which was to be the language of the maskilim until
replaced by Israeli Sephardic pronunciation. In the years just
prior to and during World War I, he developed the
extra-curricular as well as the formal program of the Talmud
Torah which was to become so influential in the Minneapolis
Jewish community and, for that matter, in world Jewry.
The Talmud Torah graduations, alumni reunions, annual Purim
banquet and annual dinner-dance became major events on the Jewish
community calendar. For 25 years its Purim banquet was a very
special expression of its own Jewish-Hebraic subculture. In its
early years, its students produced a professionally printed
literary annual, San-San, entirely in Hebrew. Its alumni
remained faithful. To give but one example, in 1978, the 1938
elementary graduating class held its 40th reunion (in Los
Angeles, to which many Minneapolis Jews migrated). In a class of
over 40 members, only 3 of those who were still alive were not
present. The Talmud Torah alumni continued to function as a
major force for the first five decades of the school's existence
and even established branches in New York, Los Angeles, and
Israel. Alumni chapters met monthly, conducted athletic programs,
sponsored continuing education, and, above all, for those in
Minneapolis, provided leadership for the school generation after
generation.
The school reached its highest enrollment of the interwar period
in 1930 with 856 pupils. In 1943, 36 percent of the pupils
enrolled in the Talmud Torah actually graduated, as against a
countrywide Hebrew school record of only 5 percent. Unlike the
situation in most Jewish schools where formal Jewish education
ended at bar or bat mitzvah, well over half and sometimes as many
as two-thirds of the elementary graduates continued into the high
school, while between 70 and 85 percent of the high school
graduates entered the Bet Midrash. The best of its products
spoke Hebrew and had a basic familiarity with Jewish culture,
although it should be noted that many of those who passed through
were not better educated than the average Hebrew school student.
Indeed, the Talmud Torah was one of the first Hebrew schools to
introduce tracking to give its better students a more intensive
program, while at the same time providing a way to enable its
weaker students to continue to study with more emphasis on
learning in English. So-called ability grouping, which enabled
the best students to learn so much, but which tended to depress
the morale of "regular students," even though they, too, ranked
above the national average, was abandoned in 1970.
The Talmud Torah placed great emphasis on the foundation grades.
Its most gifted teachers were assigned to grades Aleph and Bet
where they concentrated on learning spoken Hebrew and were
expected to acquire a vocabulary of up to 1,000 words so that
when they began to read, the language was familiar to them. One
of Dr. Gordon's greatest achievements was to secure the services
of Aaron Kass, a brilliantly gifted teacher of Hebrew to very
young children, who played a critical role in the Aleph classes
for over 50 years, remaining as popular with eight-year-olds in
his last years as he was in his first. Around him, the school
succeeded in building solid foundations in reading and speaking
Hebrew for a broad base of students.
The Talmud Torah had close relations with the Jewish Community
Federation from the first and has been its number one local
beneficiary almost since its founding, a status enjoyed by few if
any other Hebrew schools. More than that, its voluntary leaders
were leaders in the Federation as well. The entire community
benefitted from similar involvements on the part of Talmud Torah
activists and alumni.
In 1922 the Talmud Torah established a South Side branch in the
Adath Yeshurun synagogue to serve the other Jewish neighborhood
of Minneapolis. That same year they also established a branch at
Beth El synagogue to serve those in the Homewood area. In 1956,
the Fremont Avenue building was sold and a new building was
erected on Russell Avenue in the Homewood district where the Jews
were. Subsequently the Talmud Torah was to move to St. Louis
Park after the Jewish community left the North Side and moved in
that direction.
Dr. Gordon's vision was to make the Talmud Torah a center for
social services for the community as well and a Social Service
Department was organized in 1917. It sponsored clubs for Jews of
all ages and English reading and writing classes for new
immigrants. In 1920 the Talmud Torah even opened free dental and
prenatal clinics and an infant welfare clinic to serve the
neighborhood. The Social Service Department then had a full-time
director. In 1922 a swimming pool and gymnasium were added in
the Talmud Torah building. In the course of time, the Social
Service Department was spun-off to become the Emmanuel Cohen
Center in its own building which was the beginning of the
Minneapolis Jewish Community Center. Thus, in Minneapolis the
Talmud Torah actually gave birth to the community center and much
of the Jewish community's social service system.
Between 1911 and the 1950s, the Talmud Torah had a group of great
teachers, such as Menachem Heilicher, Simcha Gelb, and Solomon
Zemach, who in our times might well have become professors of
Jewish studies. Their contribution to their students was
immeasurable through the standards they set and the love of
Hebrew culture they conveyed along with their learning. The
results of their efforts were visible in the number of their
students who went on to become rabbis, teachers in Jewish
schools, members of the Jewish communal service, and halutzim in
Eretz Israel.
Despite this record of relative success, the standards at the
Minneapolis Talmud Torah began to decline as they did throughout
the country. While it remained relatively better than the other
schools, by the 1950s it could no longer produce the same level
of Hebrew literacy that it had in its early years. Even while it
kept its long hours, it was forced to abandon its
extra-curricular activities. From the late 1940s on it faced
competition from the synagogues, the public schools, and other
outside attractions for young people's extra-curricular time.
At the same time, its enrollment reached an all-time high of
1,240. In the 1960s its enrollment began to drop, in part
because of a lower birthrate, in part because of the scattering
of younger Jewish families to the farther reaches of the suburbs,
and in part because of the shift of many younger families to
Reform temple where they could send their children for bar
mitzvah training for many fewer hours a week. Nevertheless, the
Talmud Torah has fought back and continues to be one of the best,
if not the best, afternoon Hebrew school in the United States.
The United Hebrew Schools of Detroit grew out of individual
communal Hebrew schools founded before World War I. It was
formally organized as a citywide communal system in 1919 and was
one of the six Jewish agencies that founded the Detroit Jewish
Welfare Federation in 1926. In the 1920s and 1930s it developed
an extensive network of communal schools serving every Jewish
neighborhood in the city. As one of the founding constituents of
the Detroit Jewish Welfare Federation, it received communal
funding from the first.
Its premier figure was Bernard Isaacs, another Litvak who was
trained as an engineer but whose commitment to Jewish life was
such that he abandoned engineering for Jewish education. He came
to Detroit from the Indianapolis Talmud Torah. Detroit also had
its special teachers, including minor literary figures such as
A.D. Markson and H.A. Friedlander (who later went to Cleveland).
After World War II, the new leadership of the United Hebrew
Schools, led by Albert Elazar, sought to adapt to the changing
situation without abandoning its commitment to Hebrew-based
education in the national-cultural spirit and communal control of
the community's Jewish educational system. It began an
aggressive program to establish new schools in the new
suburban-like Jewish neighborhoods, a practice that continued
through the 1960s out to the second tier of suburbs beyond
Detroit.
In those years the UHS led the other community institutions in
providing services to new neighborhoods. In 1948 it founded the
Midrasha (College of Jewish Studies) to train a new generation of
Hebrew teachers and to provide advanced Jewish study in the
national-cultural mold. In 1950 it founded a library and
bookmobile system to provide Jewish books to every branch. In
time, the library acquired its own building and became a major
cultural resource for the Detroit Jewish community as a whole.
During the 1950s it pioneered in establishing educational
partnerships whereby branches of the United Hebrew Schools would
be housed in the congregations on the basis of long-term
agreements, provided UHS personnel and technical assistance for
congregational educational add-ons such as junior congregation,
teaching synagogue skills, and Sunday school. In the course of
time, all but one of the Conservative congregations and several
of the Orthodox congregations entered into this arrangement. A
different arrangement was developed with two of the city's three
Reform congregations that wanted a somewhat more intensive Jewish
education program for its young people but were not quite willing
to go for the full UHS program. Another variant of the program
brought in the community's Yiddish schools, introducing Hebrew
and religious studies into previously secular and
Yiddish-oriented institutions. By the 1960s the United Hebrew
Schools was the largest and most active communal Hebrew school
system in the United States and its students consistently scored
among the very highest in whatever standardized testing of the
results of Jewish education attempted at the time.
At its peak in the mid-1960s, the United Hebrew Schools had over
4,000 students enrolled in its various programs. In addition to
its own school buildings, it had branches at six Conservative and
Orthodox synagogues, partnerships with two Reform temples, two
Yiddish schools, and provided assistance to the afternoon schools
of the Orthodox Yeshiva Ketana. The High School of Jewish
Studies had an enrollment of over 300 students and the Midrasha
over 60 students. It had a nursery school and assisted a Yiddish
high school. It opened a Kfar Ivri, a month-long Hebrew-speaking
summer camp on the premises of the Jewish Welfare Federation's
community camp, for its older students.
The UHS and the synagogues of metropolitan Detroit had together
established the requirement that bar or bat mitzvah candidates
attend Hebrew school for five years. In 1966, the Detroit Board
of License was established to set minimum standards for teachers
in Hebrew schools. The Jewish education profession had been
strengthened by raising salary levels and offering benefits
comparable to those enjoyed by public school teachers. The UHS
maintained a fleet of over 40 school buses with its own garage
and service center to transport its students to and from its
various branches. The Superintendent of the United Hebrew
Schools, Albert Elazar, was on the first list of Shazar Prize
recipients in 1972, a prize the Minneapolis Talmud Torah received
the following year.
After Elazar's retirement that year, the UHS began to decline.
Enrollments had begun to fall earlier for the same reasons as
they were falling countrywide. None of Elazar's successors had
the quality or the commitment to carry on with a communal school
system of the same character and they began to pull back,
reducing the number of branches and failing to keep the
synagogues linked to the UHS as had been the case in the 1950s
and 1960s. The especially rapid geographic mobility of the
Detroit Jewish community made it difficult to keep up with the
Jewish population in providing educational services. In
addition, the rise of Jewish day schools, beginning in the late
1950s, offered real competition for the more serious students. In
the tradition of the national-cultural movement, Elazar had
resisted UHS involvement in day schools, remaining firmly
committed to the public school plus supplementary Jewish
education throughout his career. Thus the day schools grew up
independently of the UHS and skimmed off much of the cream from
its potential.
Who Taught in the Talmud Torahs?
One can more or less distinguish three generations of Jewish
educators who fit into the national-cultural school. The first
came onto the scene more or less between 1910 and 1920 at the
historical beginning of the twentieth century. They were
maskilim or the students of maskilim and were known as such among
their associates. They were the founders of the Talmud Torah
system described above. Their heyday continued until the
Depression and many continued to be active as long as they could
enter a classroom, until well after World War II, the last
retiring in the 1960s.
The second group came on the scene in the late 1920s and 1930s.
They saw themselves as a second generation, to some extent in
conflict with the first over what they saw as unrealistic demands
and expectations given the American Jewish reality. More of them
were trained as teachers and they were influenced by the
Progressive school of education and eager to introduce more
progressive methods into Jewish education. This generation
reached its full flowering after World War II when many of them
became the educational directors of the surviving Talmud Torahs
or the Bureaus of Jewish Education. While these men were as
dedicated as the earlier group, they were more likely to take a
modern view of retirement and hence did not stay on the job for
half a century. By and large they left the scene during the
1970s.
The third group consisted of those students of the first, mostly
American born or raised, who were the best products of the
national-cultural approach and who themselves chose to go into
Jewish education. They became teachers in the 1940s and 1950s
when the Talmud Torah system was already declining and many of
them were ultimately forced to move over into the congregational
system or were fortunate to find places in community Hebrew high
schools. Most of them retired in the early 1980s.
The intervals between these "generations" were in fact about
half-generational, perhaps fifteen years, so that the last of
them entered Jewish education in the early 1950s. Their
students, who sought Jewish educational careers, went on to
become professors of Jewish studies.
A few of these teachers were outstanding educators. Their
students remember them with affection and respect to this day.
Too many were immigrants who found their way into Jewish
education because it was all they could do. One can imagine
their suffering as they faced class after class of unruly, bored,
dissatisfied children just waiting to get out of the classroom
and into the sunlight of their normal American routines. Their
pain was inevitably communicated to their students. Some were
Hebrew scholars or litterateurs in their own right, in some cases
able to convey that love of scholarship and literature to at
least selected students, while others were doomed to be melamdim
in the eyes of the world while they tried to keep up their
scholarly and literary interests in the privacy of their homes
during their free hours. Quite a few were trained in the exact
sciences and came to Jewish education with a more systematic and
orderly understanding of the world which they tried to introduce
into the schools they served. In the early years at least, few
were actually trained as pedagogues.
Secondary and Tertiary Education
The national-cultural movement had mixed success with higher
Jewish education. The Hebrew teachers colleges, most of which
later became known as the Hebrew colleges, were not founded by
educators from the national-cultural school, although most were
taken over by them after World War I. The first such
institutions in the Mississippi Valley were started in Chicago
(1924), Cleveland (1926), and Pittsburgh (1923). The first was
the only one to develop as a serious institution and it was led
by people associated with the Teachers Institute of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of New York who, while they had a strong
commitment to Hebrew, were already looking for a different kind
of American Jewish education. The latter two foundered.
Cleveland made something of a recovery in the late 1950s and
became the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies. Pittsburgh tried
to revive its School for Jewish Studies afater World War II,
which also continued to have a checkered career.
At approximately the same time as the founding of those three,
the Minneapolis Talmud Torah trained a few of its more promising
graduates as Hebrew teachers and then absorbed them into the
school but it did not found a permanent program. The Detroit
Midrasha was founded in 1948 as part of the United Hebrew
Schools. Only those in Detroit and Pittsburgh are direct
outgrowths of the national-cultural school.
While these schools, particularly the Chicago College of Jewish
Studies, produced several generations of alumni literate in
Hebrew language, literature and history, they trained relatively
few teachers. Until the late 1960s these teachers colleges
emphasized teaching in the Ivrit b'Ivrit method and maintained a
remarkably standardized curriculum divided as follows: Bible and
Hebrew - each approximately a quarter of the curriculum;
rabbinical literature and Jewish history - each approximately 15
percent of the curriculum; education - approximately 10 percent;
and religion - the rest. This curriculum was standard for both
denominational and nondenominational Hebrew teachers colleges
throughout the United States, excepting only the most Orthodox
institutions.
In the 1970s this curriculum fell apart as the colleges of Jewish
studies sought to both compete with and connect themselves with
the university-based Jewish studies programs. The previously
fixed curriculum became a hodgepodge of electives with hardly a
common core. While the number of students taking courses may
have grown, the number graduating remained the same or declined.
The percentage graduating declined drastically. The most
appealing courses were those taught in English, dealing with
contemporary Jewish subjects such as Israel, the Holocaust, or
women in Judaism, while traditional subjects were increasingly
neglected. The Hebrew language was virtually abandoned in most
of the courses of these schools.
Reality dictated that much of the Jewish educational effort in
the Mississippi Valley, as in the rest of the United States, was
confined to the elementary years. As schools became
systematized, it became the practice for children to start their
studies at the age of 8 or perhaps a year earlier, to continue
until bar mitzvah or until graduation from elementary school in
their bar mitzvah year. With the exception of communities like
Minneapolis, a very small percentage of the elementary school
students went on to Hebrew high school.
The limited number of high school students led even the
communities which did not have Talmud Torahs to establish
communal Hebrew high schools. This was certainly the case in
Chicago where the Bureau of Jewish Education and College of
Jewish Studies sponsored a High School of Jewish Studies. It was
organized into two divisions: the communal division, where the
students who came from communal schools and the better
congregational schools took a more intensive program, and the
congregational division, designed for the average congregational
school graduate, where studies were at a lower level.
In 1953 a study was conducted by one of the students at the
College of Jewish Studies to try to assess the impact of high
school in its alumni (Appleby 1953). Appleby examined five
potential impacts: continued Hebrew studies, professional work in
the Jewish community, voluntary association and leadership in the
community, family identification with Judaism, and environmental
factors affecting the relationship. The study sample consisted of
130 people, approximately one-third of the total alumni at that
time: 68 male and 62 female ranging in age from 16 to 42. Ninety
percent continued their Jewish education after graduating from
Hebrew high school, 93 percent of them in the College of Jewish
Studies and most of the rest in the Hebrew Theological College, a
local Orthodox rabbinical training school. Over 60 percent of
the total actually obtained degrees or diplomas from the
institution of higher Jewish learning, and another 7 percent
still enrolled in degree programs at the time of the survey.
More than one-third of the total were then engaged in some form
of professional work in the Jewish field, mostly as teachers.
Over 7 percent had published a work on a Jewish topic. Some 70
percent belonged to Jewish organizations and one-third held
office in Jewish organizations. Fifty percent of the group
attended religious services regularly or often, while the other
50 percent rarely or never attended. The same division was noted
with regard to Sabbath observance subjectively defined, while 80
percent claimed to keep a kosher home and three-quarters light
Sabbath candles, both figures slightly higher than the
then-average in the total Jewish population (65 percent). Much
the same pattern is evident among the marriage partners of those
who were married at the time of the study.
During the heyday of these Hebrew colleges, from the mid-1920s to
the mid-1950s in Chicago and from the late 1940s to the late
1960s in Detroit, they were the centers of much of the social
life of their students and alumni, a self-selected group, highly
motivated Jewishly and highly committed to Jewish study -- a
postwar generation of literate and active Jews, many of whom
subsequently became professors of Jewish studies. In Chicago,
the College of Jewish Studies had an active alumni association
from the 1930s to the 1950s based on a rather select group of
Hebrew-oriented young and middle-aged people.
One of the principal vehicles for socializing in this milieu was
the Melaveh Malkah, which was adapted from a similar institution
developed in Israel to Hebraize Saturday night gatherings of
alumni and friends of the institutions in question. In time, the
Melaveh Malkah became a kind of ritualized event, worthy of
further examination in its own right. Jewish holidays and
important dates in Jewish and Zionist history were marked by
Melaveh Malkah programs as well as ordinary monthly meetings.
In 1946 the Chicago College of Jewish Studies opened Camp Sharon
as a summer Hebrew institute, in effect the college's summer
school, in a pastoral residential setting close to the shores of
"beautiful Clear Lake near Buchanan, Michigan, about 90 miles
from Chicago." Camp Sharon was the first Hebrew-emphasis camp in
the Midwest and during most of its over 20 years of existence was
Hebrew-speaking. It was a study camp where young Jews from
throughout the region had the opportunity to come and study with
leading Jewish scholars from the Midwest and other parts of the
country. Many young people seeking to pursue rabbinical careers
came to Camp Sharon to acquire the necessary background in Jewish
studies and many well-known figures in the Reform, Conservative,
and Orthodox rabbinate today were partially trained at Camp
Sharon.
In addition to Chicago, camper students came from Detroit, Kansas
City, St. Louis, Buffalo, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St. Paul,
Cincinnati, and Omaha (Primack, 1953). Scholars and students from
outside the region taught and learned at Camp Sharon as well. No
doubt for many of the scholars this was the only opportunity to
teach advanced students and to escape from their lower-level
educational responsibilities during the year.
Conclusion
In the end, the national-cultural approach did not survive.
Hebrew language and culture did not flourish in the Mississippi
Valley any more than they did elsewhere in the United States. The
pioneer educators succeeded in developing one or two generations
of successors. After that, for a variety of reasons, there was
no third or fourth generation. The synagogues aggressively and
successfully fought to take over Jewish education, killing or
attenuating the communal schools in all but two or three
communities. None but the very largest congregations could
afford full-time professional teachers. They cultivated a
profession of educational administrators with part-time teachers,
usually poorly trained. Few were sufficiently proficient in
Hebrew language and culture to begin with. Those that were
tended to be textually rather than nationally oriented. The way
of American Jewish life militated against the national-cultural
approach. After World War II being Jewish became a matter of
religious identification and after the 1960s a matter of
sociology. In neither was Hebrew culture as such an important
factor.
In the 1950s the communal Hebrew schools and Talmud Torahs that
survived also had to adjust to changing circumstances in order to
survive. Accordingly, they reduced their comprehensive programs,
all but eliminated their extra-curricular school-centered
activities, and shortened their hours of instruction to
accommodate such new realities as suburban carpools, competition
from the public schools for "after school" hours, and the decline
of the Jewishness of the average Jewish home. In the lower
grades, the best schools fostered innovations designed to cope
with these changes and new directions were developed. While
Hebrew remained central to their curriculum and they did not
abandon all of their national-cultural aspirations to the
"synagogue skills" trend of the congregational schools, they did
diminish the extent of their teaching the language and Hebrew
texts out of necessity as the number of hours were reduced. At
the end of the 1950s very few of their students were learning
Jewish history in Hebrew or reading advanced literary works
before the college level if at all. Nevertheless there remained
a small group in the community Hebrew high schools and colleges
of Jewish studies who were capable of doing both.
Even as they failed to secure their Hebrew and national-cultural
goals, those educators raised up the generation that founded the
more serious institutions of Jewish life in their communities,
from Hebrew-speaking groups, to Conservative synagogues, to
agencies for Jewish education. Many of their students went on to
become the pioneer professors of Jewish studies in the American
universities. Indeed, for the whole United States it can be said
that it was the national-cultural movement that provided the
founders of the Jewish studies movement in the universities,
people committed to Jewish culture and the Hebrew language but
not necessarily to a religious vocation in the rabbinate or to
Orthodoxy. Ironically, the rise of Jewish studies frequently
sabotaged university Hebrew programs. Nevertheless, Jewish
studies in the United States may be the lasting monument of those
pioneer educators.
A Personal Note
Since the subject at hand is not really mine, I do not pretend in
this paper to do more than present fragments for the history that
needs to be written. On the other hand, my family and I lived
through the greater part of the effort and were personally
involved in it. Rose Goldman, my aunt, was in the first
graduating class of the famed Minneapolis Talmud Torah. When she
and her sister (my mother) were orphaned, Dr. George J. Gordon,
one of the founders of that Talmud Torah and later its principal
(he gave up his medical practice for Jewish education), was their
guardian. My mother not only graduated from the Talmud Torah
through Bet Midrash but was part of a group of Bet Midrash
graduates trained as Hebrew teachers by Dr. Gordon at the Talmud
Torah. She was one of the two original librarians of the Talmud
Torah library, one of the first modern popular Jewish libraries
in the United States and perhaps the first to emphasize Hebrew
rather than Yiddish. Later she went into Hebrew teaching at the
Talmud Torah and, still later, in Denver, Chicago, and Detroit.
In the 1930s, she was principal of the Temple of Aaron Sunday
School in St. Paul. Sometime after, my aunt became librarian, the
position which she held for over 20 years, to become a legend
within the Talmud Torah.
My father began teaching in the St. Paul Talmud Torah in 1929. He
subsequently headed congregational Hebrew schools in Chicago and
Denver (in Chicago, Bnei Israel of Austin and Anshe Emet and
Denver, Beth Midrash Hagadol) and then became the superintendent
of the United Hebrew Schools of Detroit, probably the most
extensive communal Talmud Torah system ever to exist in the
United States. In the 1930s he was one of the founders of the
Midwest Federation of Teachers and his organization work took him
to every community in the Mississippi Valley and its peripheries,
from Buffalo and Pittsburgh in the East to New Orleans in the
south, to Denver in the West. In 1947 my father was one of the
founders of the first Camp Ramah, initiated by the Jewish
educators, rabbis and concerned laymen of Chicago, over the
doubts (and some objections) of the Jewish Theological Seminary,
and he gave the camp its name. All told, he spent over forty
years actively involved in the profession, all in the Mississippi
Valley.
I was educated in those afternoon schools from Gan through the
Detroit Midrasha and the Chicago College of Jewish Studies. I
attended Camp Sharon, sponsored by the Chicago College of Jewish
Studies, and Ramah, in turn. In 1950 I founded the United Hebrew
Schools Library in Detroit and when I relinquished my
responsibilities there after earning my Ph.D., my brother found
his way into librarianship, ultimately became head of that
library and moved on to a distinguished career in library
leadership in Israel where he is today. I myself had the
privilege of teaching in the Minneapolis Talmud Torah while I was
teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1963-65. While a
graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was head teacher
of the religious school in Kankakee, Illinois (where one of my
students was the child of one of my mother's pupils from
Minneapolis). I personally knew most of the people involved in
the educational activities discussed above.
In sum, the collective memory and records of our family go back
to before World War I, to the very first generation of Hebrew
education in the Mississippi Valley. I have drawn heavily on
them as well as other sources for this fragment.
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Communal Agency for Jewish Education," Paper presented at the
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session, Sunday, November 13, 1960.
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(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949).
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Minneapolis (Minneapolis: Talmud Torah of Minneapolis, 1926).
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Appendix A
Regions, States, and Cities Where the Midwest Federation of
Hebrew Teachers Was Active
Northwest: Minnesota: Minneapolis, St. Paul
Middle West: Illinois: Chicago, Waukegan
Indiana: Indianapolis
Iowa: Sioux City
Michigan: Detroit, Grand Rapids
Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
Nebraska: Omaha
New York: Buffalo, Niagara Falls
Ohio: Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus,
Dayton, Toledo
Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh
Wisconsin: Milwaukee, Superior
South: Kentucky: Louisville
Louisiana: New Orleans
West: Colorado: Denver
Canada: Ontario: Niagara Falls
