Communism, Secularism and Jewish Schools My grandfather fled the Soviet Union for the liberty New York wants to deny me. By Dovid Margolin
Mr. Margolin is a senior editor at Chabad.org.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks launched a harsh war on religious education throughout the Soviet Union, with devastating consequences for Judaism. To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, Soviet attacks on traditional Jewish schools, known as cheders or yeshivas, were led by the Yevsektzia, the militant Jewish sections of the Communist Party, whose members were often more ideologically zealous than their gentile counterparts. In an effort to win Jewish hearts and minds, in January 1921 the Yevsektzia organized a particularly grotesque episode called the Trial of the Cheder.
Held in Vitebsk, the six-day show trial was similar to the medieval disputations with which Jews had contended for centuries. “Experts” on education and hygiene testified that the cheder was backward and dirty. The spectacle quickly devolved into a blatant attack on Judaism.
Despite a valiant defense by Vitebsk’s Jewish community, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Every cheder in Vitebsk was ordered to close. In the early 1920s, more than 1,000 cheders were closed in the U.S.S.R.
My grandfather’s Jewish education was terminated at a second-grade level by this crackdown. Born in Ukraine in 1920, my great-grandparents wanted him to receive authentic Jewish schooling. Even as communism destroyed their world, they persisted and sent their young son to a cheder.
“I barely got past alef beis”—the Hebrew alphabet—“and it was closed,” my grandfather told me shortly before his death last spring at 100. “Some teachers were arrested or shot, others scared away. Before long it was all gone.”
Cut off from his heritage, it was against all odds that he remained tenaciously committed to Judaism, imparting its importance to his children. Sadly, many others were unable. The Yevsektzia targeted Jewish parents’ rights to give their children a religious education because they knew it was vital to sustaining Jewish tradition. Rabbi Yosef Y. Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, charged his followers to do everything they could for the cause of Jewish education in the U.S.S.R., even sacrifice their lives if necessary. For his activism he was arrested in 1927 and sentenced to death. He was later expelled from the country instead.
It was this kind of persecution that led Jews to seek a life of freedom in the U.S. Their first priority was to provide their children with a Jewish education. In 1940 Schneersohn arrived in New York from Nazi-occupied Europe and immediately established a yeshiva.
Today New York’s yeshivas face a challenge with echoes of ancient persecution. As of 2018, 110,000 students were enrolled in Orthodox yeshivas in New York City, an increase of 46.3% in the past two decades. Many parents, including my wife and me, are opting for yeshiva education.
But some in New York—such as the Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, a fringe group of mostly former Orthodox Jews who bill themselves as yeshiva-reform advocates—wish to place the city’s Jewish schools on trial. They accuse yeshivas of concentrating too much on Jewish teachings and neglecting secular education.
Officials in Albany have taken up their demands. In 2018 then-Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia unilaterally issued guidelines based on Yaffed’s proposals. She warned that children attending yeshivas that don’t comply with these new directions could be found truant—which might lead Child Protective Services to remove them from their homes. A court struck the guidelines down in 2019 on procedural grounds, so Ms. Elia reissued them as formal regulations. Though not yet enacted, Yaffed’s attendant public campaign to vilify Jewish parents like me continues unabated.
The truth is yeshiva education emphasizes transferable skills such as critical thinking, logical reasoning and nuanced debate. Even elementary-school pupils engage in complex argumentation when studying Talmud. That’s a much higher standard than many public schools achieve.
What this campaign seeks to dismiss is the traditional Jewish outlook on education. While today’s secular culture focuses on the technocratic transmission of skills in preparation for a career and material success, the goal of yeshiva education is to teach children how to live. Yeshiva empowers children to see meaning in their lives beyond money and social status, to understand their duty to improve the world.
It’s the transmission of age-old Jewish wisdom, intellectual curiosity and love of learning, founded upon accountability to the “Eye that Sees, and Ear that Hears.”
My grandfather fled to the U.S. for the promise of a society that respected religious liberty, the very freedoms he was denied. Jewish history has shown time and again that those who can’t tolerate cultural differences seek to impose their will on others by any means. That’s true in the new world as well as the old.
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