9 - The Slobodka Yeshiva

Summary

THE SLOBODKA YESHIVA, founded around 1881, was a completely new type of yeshiva, and it became one of the most influential of its time. It was unique in combining intensive Talmud study with a passionate commitment to developing its students’ moral character and instilling in them an awareness that a concern with musar (ethics) was an essential attribute of a Torah scholar. These innovations were not accepted unquestioningly. This chapter examines the reasons and background for this, as well as the opposition that the founders had to face and the difficulties that eventually split the institution.

The Slobodka yeshiva was founded in very different circumstances from those of Volozhin. Volozhin developed its unique form because the demand for Talmud study of the sort that it offered required greater financial support than the local population could offer. In the absence of an appropriate institutional model that R. Hayim could follow he had to come up with his own solution for the problem; the founders of Slobodka, in contrast, could base themselves on Volozhin, and in fact did so. Like Volozhin, Slobodka had two rashei yeshivah, operated a continuous study year, gave allowances to students, and abandoned the traditional pattern of students eating meals with the local inhabitants. Like Volozhin, too, Slobodka used emissaries to raise funds; the difference was that because devotion to Torah study and maintaining Jewish traditions more generally was seen as outmoded by key sectors of Jewish society at the end of the nineteenth century, fundraising was much more difficult and depended less on support from communal elites than on help from individuals with an ideological commitment to the yeshiva's approach.

In the late nineteenth century young men could choose from a number of tempting alternatives toTorah study as ameans of advancement and fulfilment: integration into the surrounding society, political activity and membership in the revolutionarymovement, secular studies, Zionism, and other spheres.The response of the founder of the Slobodka yeshiva, R. Natan Tsevi Finkel (1849–1927), was to change the curriculumand, in particular, to introduce the systematic study of ethics, ormusar. In his view, the yeshiva could no longer be exclusively devoted to Talmud study, as at Volozhin: it had to shape students’ characters.