6 - Do Jewish Schools Make a Difference in the Former Soviet Union?

Summary

INTENSIVE JEWISH EDUCATION is seen in many countries, including Israel, as the most promising antidote to the assimilation of Jews—meaning the loss of Jewish identity and commitment. Full-day schools especially have been seized upon by Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and their foreign supporters as the optimal solution to the lack of Jewish education, institutions, public life, and private religious practice among the 400,000 or so Jews left in the FSU. This conclusion is based on extrapolation from Western Jewry's experiences. Common sense would also lead one to believe that viable Jewish life—that which engages people in private and public Jewish behaviours and transmits commitment across generations— depends on education, and not of children alone.

One crucial difference between the West and the FSU is that in the West Jewish education is conveyed in a wider context of Jewish commitment and activity: the family, organized peer and interest groups, a communal structure, religious and cultural institutions, and family and group traditions. In the FSU Jewish schools exist in a partial void. Jewish public institutions were abolished by the Soviet authorities after 1948 when the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and many of its leaders were arrested. In 1930 the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party were dissolved, and earlier still Jewish religious, Zionist, and/or Hebrew schools had been closed. Although the USSR was the only State in the world to provide füll funding for a network of Jewish schools, these were all run in Yiddish. No Hebrew was taught, Judaism was referred to only to criticize it, and Jewish history was limited to the modern era in the Russian empire and the USSR. There were about 1,100 Soviet Yiddish schools in 1931, in which 130,000 students were enrolled. Of all the Jewish children who attended school at all in Belorussia and Ukraine, in the former Pale of Settlement, nearly half were enrolled in Yiddish schools. But urbanization, industrialization, and the attractiveness of Russian culture as the key to social, economic, and political mobility led most Jewish parents to choose Russian (sometimes Ukrainian, rarely Belorussian) schools for their children.