6 - Life at the Volozhin Yeshiva

Summary

The Daily Routine

The daily routine at Volozhin reflected the values and goals of the rashei yeshivah. Though not identical to that of modern yeshivas, it was broadly similar. A description of the daily routine in the 1880s by M. A. Eisenstadt reads as follows:

I would get up at nine o’clock and hurry off to the yeshiva for morning prayers, which took only fifteen to twenty minutes. From the very first day, I noticed that they did not drag out the prayers unnecessarily … Talmud study was the centre of everything. The students saw it as an advantage of our yeshiva over others, where students were forced to spend hours and hours in prayer and in reading books of musar.When prayers finished I hurried back tomy roomformymorningmeal, and at ten o’clock I went back to the yeshiva. The rosh yeshivah's shiur began at exactly eleven o’clock and continued for over an hour … on the days when I did not stay to listen to the shiur I went straight back ‘home’; otherwise I came home only at two o’clock in the afternoon, and stayed there about an hour for lunch and reading the Bible. At the third hour of the afternoon I returned to the yeshiva—this time until ten o’clock at night. At half past ten I left home and went back to the yeshiva and stayed there until two in the morning. Each night, before going to sleep, I used to go over Weber's general history.

One can raise questions about the details in this description. Nine o’clock in the morning seems a rather late hour for morning prayers, though sunrise in mid-winter in Volozhin can be after nine o’clock. Berdyczewski's description from the same period records that prayers began at eight o’clock. The time taken up by prayers also seems unusually short, but since none of the memoirs mention prayer at Volozhin as being in any way a special activity or emotional experience, Eisenstadt may be correct in saying that little importance was attached to them. Berdyczewski reports that after prayers, the students returned to their rooms for breakfast except that those who wanted to hear R. Berlin's shiur on the weekly Torah portion stayed on at the yeshiva.