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.
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