The Lazy Masmid : July 2023

YU's history has been an integral part of how it presents itself the world since its earliest days. The first instance of deliberate history writing for the school was in 1907. An I. Cohen (not yet identified) wrote an article about RIETS in honor of its tenth anniversary. Cohen briefly describes how the school formed, before describing how it presently functioned in 1907, praising it for its great accomplishments. Though there is no reason to doubt Cohen's retelling of the events of RIETS' formation, we still need to consider the context in which this article was written.

1907 was not a good year for the young Yeshiva. Since 1905, the school had faced two publicity disasters in form of two student strikes against the policies of the administration. In both instances, the students complained about the lack of a curriculum in the school and administration's eagerness to end the stipend program that students used to feed themselves.

The Yiddish press and a significant proportion of the dues paying members of RIETS were siding with the students. The lack of a curriculum meant that there was no explicit and clear path for students to follow that would endure their graduation. This caused many students to spend more time in school that was really necessary. The overall effect was that the Yeshiva graduated a few rabbis per year in contrast to the 90 some full time students enrolled in the school. The public along with the students were also pressuring the Yeshiva to create a more advanced secular studies program to graduate more well rounded rabbis.

Cohen's article does not address any of this controversy. Instead, he attributes the formation of the Yeshiva to the organizing of the first Roshei Yeshiva to teach there. Considering the start of the Yeshiva from the beginning of when classes began to be offered and not from how the board and funding was first organized. This focus on the development of the studies themselves as the primary focus of the history is not unusual for histories of Yeshivas, but it centers the primary mission of the Yeshiva as traditional Torah study, like they have in Europe. As Cohen moves his narrative to his present day, he praises the Yeshiva for its success in becoming a center of pure Torah study, educating many American born students in traditional old world methods of Talmud study. Even directly comparing the Yeshiva to the Yeshiva of Volozhin.

When viewed in its historical context, Cohen was arguing for keeping the Yeshiva running under the same model under which it had existed in the previous decade. This argument, being written as a history, is probably directed towards the public to encourage them to support the Yeshiva, though Cohen never makes any specific appeals for donations. Its not clear if he was directly involved in the administration. In fact Cohen's narrative lacks an important part of the messaging that the Yeshiva administration had been pushing until that point. Since 1897, the Yeshiva had been presenting itself to the American public as a school that actively educated in Torah and secular studies, seeking to educate well rounded students. By 1905 it became clear to the public that this was not really true, but it did not stop the Yeshiva administration from continuing to present itself in that way. Cohen does not include any of this language. He makes no effort to exaggerate the elementary English language classes that the school offered. He seems proud of the fact that some of the students at RIETS were also high school graduates, but college level studies seems out of the question for Cohen who clearly wants RIETS to be as traditional a Yeshiva as possible.

Cohen's desire to keep the Yeshiva tradition had to contend against the powerful arguments coming from those desiring reform. The reformers had practical arguments for how curriculum reform would benefit the efficiency of the Yeshiva education and would train rabbis more equipped to serve American Jews. To combat this desire for change, Cohen turns to history for his argument. Presenting the history of RIETS as a trajectory pushing towards a traditional Yeshiva, a method that he argues has seen success.

Cohen's article can be found here. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/espac/1907/02/15/01/article/4

Friday, July 7, 2023

The 1905 RIETS Strike

The early histories of RIETS and Yeshiva College that were written to honor the school's 50th anniversary Jubilee in 1937 presented a simplified narrative of how strained relations between the students and administration of RIETS in the first decade of the 20th century started the school on a path towards modernization. Gilbert Klaperman's research in the late 1950s built on these earlier short histories, and he presented a story of two separate strikes, one in 1906 and another in 1908 that culminated in the consequential board meeting that propelled the school into the modern era.

Historian's understanding of RIETS before 1915, is very spotty. There are zero surviving internal records meaning that everything is based on published material in newspapers and magazines from the era. I've been finding articles that Klaperman overlooked in his monument research. Namely Dovid Moshe Hermalin's series on the Yeshivas of New York from 1903. But just today I found a gem in the New Era Illustrated Magazine.

I was tipped off to the existence of this article since it's cited in the endnotes on the article about RIETS in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. Incredibly, the magazine was digitized on google books. The article is located in the March-April issue of the 1905 New Era Illustrated Magazine. It is titled "The New York Yeshibath" written by Sampson Lederhendler. Similar to Hermalin's 1903 series, this article describes the environment of the Yeshiva and some its curriculum. Though Lederhendler is quite a bit more patronizing to the culture of the school than Hermalin, jesting that the students were, "continually swaying their bodies to and fro, as if they had discovered the secret of perpetual motion." Lederhendler's article also provides us with some breathtaking, high quality photos of the interior of the Yeshiva.

The article really caught my attention when he mentioned that "refractory uprisings are very frequent here," going on to describe two separate instances of the students going strike. Reading this, I quickly checked to confirm that this article was in fact published in March 1905 almost a whole year before the "first" strike mentioned in the official histories.

I needed to double check the accuracy of this claim, so I turned to the National Library of Israel's American Yiddish newspaper collection to see if I could locate some corroborating articles.

You bet I did. Now, to be clear, I have not yet been able to reconstruct an exact timeline of how all this played out, the sources are still fairly scarce, but there is enough evidence from different sources to be reasonably confident that there was student unrest at the Yeshiva in the beginning of 1905.

Lederhandler relays the following series of events.

One of the Vice Presidents of the school proposed a plan that would allow the Yeshiva to save money on the student's stipends. The main purpose of these stipends to was allow the students to devote their full energies to study without having to worry about paying for meals and other basic life needs. The Yeshiva already supplied lodging and laundry for the students who needed it, but the students paid for their food out of pocket from their stipend. The Vice President's plan was to create a Kessel (a communal pot) i.e. a rudimentary food service to directly supply the students' food. Centralizing food production for all students would be cheaper than each student arranging for his own meals, allowing them to cease paying stipends. Another added benefit was that this communal meal would ensure that all the students were keeping a strict level of Kashrut and that they were reciting the proper blessings for their meals.

The students were not happy with this plan, preferring the financial flexibility that the stipends provided. On the night that this plan was to be voted on by the board and adopted, the students declared themselves on strike. The administration responded by promising to discipline the students who organized the strike and replace them with fresh immigrants from Ellis Island, even placing ads in the paper to recruit new students. The striking students threatened to physically prevent any of the directors from entering the Yeshiva building so long as they continued with their plan to do away with the stipends. Ultimately the threat of bringing all the details to the press caused the administration to relent and restore the most expensive stipends.

This narrative brings up a few problems. Firstly, the ads in the paper should be verifiable, but I have not been able to locate such ads yet. (Now this isn't a disproof since there are still plenty of papers that have not been digitized yet from this era) Further, there is the issue of who is relaying this information to the Lederhendler, especially of the Yeshiva students agreed not to relay the details of this confrontation to the press.

February 24, 1905, a lengthy letter to the editor was printed at the end of the Daily Jewish Herald. The letter was signed "All the Students of Yeshivas Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan." The letter structured like the strike letters from 1906 and 1908. The letters opens with a critique of the curriculum of the Yeshiva. The students explained how the Judaic studies lacked a clear curricular system, and the secular studies barely covered elementary knowledge of the English language. The students argued that the Yeshiva had the potential to become a significant force in the global Jewish community. The talent from the students and faculty was underutilized, and if the administration could institute a well thought out curriculum, the school would be able to train the highest quality rabbis.

The students then illustrated their more immediate fight with the administration. They explain how the administration wanted to stop paying the weekly stipend in favor of providing a communal pot for free food for the students. The students vehemently protested this change.

On the front page of the Daily Jewish Herald February 28, 1905, the headline read, "Chaim Stiller's Tragic Death; he came to study at the Yeshiva Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan and he was thrown to peddle with a basket to earn his daily bread; Who Is Guilty?"

The article continues describing how Chaim Stiller, a young man in his early twenties, had spent most of his youth studying in European Yeshivas to join the rabbinate. He came to America in January 1905 to study at RIETS in an environment free from old world antisemitism. He arrived at the Yeshiva right as the disagreement over whether or not to cease providing the students with a stipend began. Without a stable source of income he had to leave the Yeshiva and took on peddling to earn enough for his basic sustenance. In late February, he was out peddling in a snowstorm and collapsed from the cold. He brought to Governor's Hospital and was pronounced dead. The Chevrah Chesed shel Emes paid for his burial.

The Daily Jewish Herald was not happy about this situation at all. They argued that Chaim Stiller showed promise as a young scholar and should never have been abandoned to the streets by the Yeshiva. I don't know how much of Stiller's biography in this article is accurate. It's very easy for the press to exaggerate these kinds of stories. However, the paper's critique is clear, they felt that the administration of RIETS' games with the students' stipend needed to end, because the consequences would be (and already had become) dire.

We can see from this news article in the Herald, that RIETS was withholding their student's stipends in January and February of 1905. This does not support any other details of the strike that Lederhendler described, but the basic catalyst of the strike, the withholding of the stipends certainly happened.

On March 3, 1905, the Daily Jewish Herald published a letter to the editor from a Hillel Jablonski from Reading, PA who claimed to be a dues paying member of RIETS. Jablonski was not happy about the current state of affairs at the Yeshiva. He generally sided with students demands in their letter published on February 24. He also expressed some frustration with the dues collectors who he felt misrepresented the Yeshiva to donors and paying members, claiming that the Yeshiva offered a modern education, when the students clearly stated that it didn't.

This whole incident seems to have shaken the board of RIETS' confidence in the public image of the school. For four days, April 10 to April 13, RIETS ran an advertisement in the Daily Jewish Herald, that contained a short open letter from Rabbi Bernard Leventhal endorsing the Yeshiva. Leventhal stated that he recently visited the Yeshiva and found the students to be focused on their studies, receiving their stipend from the Yeshiva as well as getting a good education in the language of the land (English). He added that everything running properly and in order and that American Jews should not hesitate to donate to this worthy cause through the fundraisers who were travelling across the country collecting funds.

Thursday, July 6, 2023

YU Historiography Part 1

Yeshiva University has been around for a while and has generated some amount of history writing. Academics who work for the school have produced several books, Public Relations writers have authored short histories, students have recorded history from their own perspectives, and outsiders looking in have also penned their own understandings of the school.

The earliest published histories of Yeshiva University come from a time before the school had that name. In honor of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and Yeshiva College's 50th anniversary or Golden Jubilee in April 1937, the registrar Jacob Hartstein published an article in several different publications detailing the school's history until that point. A version of it called "A Half Century of Torah in America" was published in the two main student publications at the time, Hedenu and The Commentator, published by the students of RIETS and Yeshiva College respectively. Another version of this article called "The Yeshiva Looks Back Over Fifty Years" was published in the Jewish Education journal.

The school was still too small to have a full time public relations staff, so the registrar, having access to all the institutional paperwork, is a reasonable choice for the person to write history of the school for popular consumption. Though Hartstein would rise through the ranks of Yeshiva's administration, later being appointed Dean of the graduate degree programs, he continued to publish articles about the history of the school for the 50th anniversary of RIETS in 1946. Versions of these articles appeared in the American Jewish Yearbook under the title "Yeshiva University; Growth of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary" and the Hebrew weekly ha-Doar under the title "yeshivat rabbeinu yitzhak elhanan."

Both series of 50th anniversary articles have basically the same content. The narrative focuses mostly on the size and scope of the school as it developed. The focus is almost entirely on the vision of the school's administrators. Hartstein traces the origin of Yeshiva University to the Yeshiva Eitz Chaiem, a Jewish primary school that was formed in 1886 to offer instruction in traditional Jewish subjects as well as a basic secular curriculum that was comparable to public school education. He dates the creation of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary to 1896 and characterizes the school as being created for traditional Torah study "for its own sake" with the incidental ability to ordain Rabbis. Hartstein then briefly mentions that the students wanted RIETS to have a more structured curriculum that would benefit them as Rabbis in the field, and in 1908 the administration responded positively and began the slow process of instituting reforms. These culminated in the 1915 merger between Eitz Chaiem and RIETS with Bernard Revel as President of the new Rabbinical College of America. Under his direction the school expanded to have the Talmudical Academy High School and the Teachers Institute. Hartstein then details how the school began fundraising to build a College of Arts and Sciences in the mid 1920s, which resulted in the creation of Yeshiva College in 1928. Then he brings the reader into the present illustrating the advances since then. In 1937, its mostly the important people who have been granted honorary degrees, but in 1946 Yeshiva has just become recognized as a university by the board of regents so he includes the various new graduate schools as well. Hartstein's whole narrative of the history is designed to paint a picture of a constantly advancing school that is able to adapt successfully to the changing times without losing sight of its mission. This kind of message is very helpful for assuring potential donors that their money will be responsibly and productively spent.

Hartstein's public relations type history is very simplified to fit in a short article and only discusses the school from the perspective of the activity of the school's leadership. Despite the narrow scope of Hartstein's narrative, its perceived effectiveness as form of good public relations has given it serious influence on how larger histories of the school have been written later on. That is Klaperman and Gurock's books on Yeshiva's history, published in 1967 and 1987 respectively. Klaperman's book was originally a dissertation that he finished in 1958. Both of these longer books are structured within Harstein's framework. They each have chapters dedicated to early Eitz Chaiem, early RIETS, the 1908 student protests, the 1915 merger, the founding of Yeshiva College, and then general institutional growth since then. Klaperman is happy to exist in this model of simplified administration focused history. He even published his own article on the school's history in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly journal to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary.

Though Gurock's book is still written in Hartstein's framework, as a scholar he pushes back against the administration focused historiography. He spends some time interrogating the student body demographics throughout the years and how it fluctuated. He's written other articles focusing entirely on the student's experience. Such as the his article "The Beginnings of Team Torah u-Madda" in the Torah u-Madda journal from 2006. In following this pattern, other more modern historians like Zev Elef have written articles entirely focused on student activities, like Elef's article on the history of the Commentator (I need to locate the citation again).

In another installment we will take a look at other non-academic sources of history writing.

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

The Sabbath Visitor

Another newspaper of interest on the National Library of Israel's online collection is The Sabbath Visitor. This paper was published from 1874 to the late 19th century (I haven't been able to determine the extent of its run yet.) The Visitor was created by Rabbi Max Lilienthal as a forum to discuss Jewish education and produce educational materials. A copy of an issue from 1882 is available on the University of Pennsylvania Library's website. We can observe from this copy that the paper was published weekly and consisted solely of articles written by adults for the young readers of the paper. We also see that by 1882, Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger had taken over the paper from Lilienthal.

My main interest are in the issues digitized by the National Library of Israel. These issues are from 1887 and 1888 and offer a very different kind of paper from the 1882 issue. In 1887 we see that Isidor Wise had become the editor of the paper. The paper was now published monthly with each issue topping 70 pages. The paper continued to include educational material written by Jewish educators, but in its monthly form it also incorporated a significant amount of reader submitted content. Children who read the magazine could submit short stories, poetry, and other kinds of writing to a section called "Israel's Flower Garden." Another section called the "Letter Box" was filled with reader submitted letter in which they talked about whatever they wanted. Letters to the editor are very common in all kinds of papers and periodicals, but this section often topped 20 pages in length. Both user submitted sections were edited by a person who identified themselves as "Sadie." She would publish all the letters sent to her in the letter box and would occasionally directly respond to them. She also makes comments that suggest that she would forward privately addressed letters between readers that had previously submitted to the paper, allowing readers of the paper to communicate without having to know each other's addresses.

Though Israel's Flower Garden is fascinating in of itself as a witness to creativity and interests of American Jewish children during these years, the Letter Box has really caught my attention through its striking similarity to modern day social media. Reading though each issue's large collection of letters feels like sifting through an old internet message board. Some readers just submit short letters announcing that they are there, others talk a little bit about life where they live, a few will send in long rants giving their personal take on the discourse of the day, and other's profess their love to Sadie asking her to marry them in ways that are eerily similar to how maladjusted men behave towards women on the internet today. Not all the people submitting letters will sign their real names on the letter, echoing the anonymous qualities of an internet username. A few examples of such 'usernames' are "Saw Bones," "Big Boy," and "Incognito." In manner of most letters to the editor, Sadie will print the city of origin for all submissions, including those with anonymous names. The people submitting really come from all across the United States, many of them from large cities like Cincinnati and Chicago, but also a significant number from small villages all across the country. Many of these small town readers would comment on how beneficial this magazine was to their Jewish identity being so far removed from large Jewish communities in the cities.

There is a lot that can be learned from this fascinating publication. Though I don't currently have the time to dive deeper, I really hope to be able to some time in the near future.

Monday, July 3, 2023

The Last of His Family

About three years ago, the National Library of Israel released its digital newspaper archive. This collection has consolidated Jewish newspapers and periodicals from across the global Jewish diaspora from the 18th century to the late 20th century. As a researcher, the search function has become an invaluable tool for gaining all kinds of useful historical information at a moments notice.

This collection has alerted me to some fascinating glimpses into how different elements of the global Jewish community created and consumed media. One really cool example is how the press of the highly traditional Yishuv ha-Yashan in Jerusalem published serial novels. Havatzelet was a weekly paper that was published in Jerusalem for the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Jerusalem as its primary audience. The paper ran from around 1870 until 1910. During its first decade the paper used most of its space on publishing articles on topics in Torah study along with a little news. Overtime the news section grew and the Torah articles began to be augmented with more features pieces on all manner of topics. By 1890s, the paper started publishing serial novels.

The first of these novels to catch my eye was called ha-Acharon be-Mishpachto or "The Last of His Family." It was published in 30 instalments in the year 1896. (I was researching some events from that year and one of the chapters of the novel caught my eye.) I indexed all the instalments about two years ago, and I figured I could publish it here for anyone who would be interested in such a thing.

Based on the attribution of the story within the newspaper, it appears that this novel originally appeared in a Jewish paper called Der Israelit from Mainz, Germany. The story was anonymously translated from German into Hebrew and reprinted in Havatzelet. I have not read through the entire thing and I do not currently have plans to do so. But I did read some small sections, and it seems very much like a Romance of some kind set in very Victorian environment with large estates and palaces with servants. Anyone who does feel interested in reading it is welcome to reach out to me with the TLDR.

Here is the index of the installments in Havatzelet on the NLI's website.