The school leaders want to save themselves by creating Sunday schools, opening schools in public school buildings where the expenses will more or less be covered by tuition and there will be no need for outside activities. A full thirty-five percent of the children who attend the Sholem Aleichem Schools attend only a Sunday school. Twenty percent of the Arbeter-Ring schools find themselves in public school buildings, where lessons consist of a few short hours and it is impossible to conduct any additional activities. Now the Arbeter Ring is planning to establish Sunday schools.

The most pitiful schools are in the new communities of the suburbs of New York. The new communities have established centers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, have installed young rabbis with secretaries, and have opened afternoon schools with dozens of teachers. We establish Sunday schools there, or set up schools in the public school buildings, where there is no place for even a minimum of cultural activities. Of course the teachers in the folk schools cannot compete with the rabbi, who is usually also a university graduate and has an abundant supply of assistants.

The old school activists pride themselves on the fact that a small number of our children who graduated from the folk schools have now become the founders of secular schools. But the activists do not communicate the whole picture. The new mothers and fathers who found secular schools fail to carry on even the meager heritage of their parents. They establish Sunday schools where the official language is English. They are poorer than their parents. We did not keep Shabbos, but would read something about Shabbos: A story, a holiday or Shabbos song. We created a substitute Judaism. The Yiddish language and the rich Yiddish literature were the substitute. But our children have come to a point where they talk about Yiddish language and about Yiddish literature … in English. A great distance!

All Jewish educators have always regarded Sunday schools as a plague. But at least an institutional Judaism, such as Reform Judaism or even the Conservative Movement, can still achieve something in a Sunday school. They can prepare children for a certain hollowed-out, formulaic Judaism; a few blessings, a few rituals, a taste of bible and Jewish history, the order of the prayers in English, hymns; learn a few specific prayers in Hebrew by heart, and the child is qualified to be a member of the temple. But what kind of concrete subjects can be learned in a secular Yiddish Sunday school? Can you imagine teaching worldly or secular Yiddishkayt in English? ^{2 2} Trans. note: here the author relies on the double meaning of Yiddishkayt as both “Judaism” and “Yiddish-ness”.
The whole innovation of the secular Yiddishist schools has been the consciousness that Judaism does not stand on ceremony and ritual, but on a National, linguistic heritage, which is supposed to contain everything. Get rid of the Yiddish language and it is like the Gemara says: “Cut off his head and let him not die.”

The movement towards Sunday schools is like a smokescreen. It seems to me personally that it is a pretext for an easy and cheaper Judaism. Various excuses are given for the Sunday schools: there aren’t enough teachers; there is not a concentration of Jews living in certain suburbs. But the truth was let out of the bag in passing by Zalman Yefroikin in Culture and Education, October, 1955: “The young parents in certain areas have not been able to, or have been afraid to, assume the burden of an afternoon school.”

That is the real truth. No Jewish community, other than the secularists, takes so little interest in Jewish life. No synagogue, no temple, no rabbi, no Shabbos, no holiday, no language—a Sunday school in English!

No, there is nothing to brag about with the new parents, the English-speaking graduates of our schools. They are ostensibly qualified for the secular Yiddishist school movement. It’s not true, they are actually seeking an even easier form of Judaism than the one they got in their youths in the folk schools. They are merely further diluting their already watered-down Yiddishist education. We at least had a secular Yiddish movement in Yiddish. The want Yiddish and secularism in English, which is meaningless.

The salvation of the Yiddish schools will not come from them. The revitalization and deepening of the Yiddishist schools can come from a new orientation. We must take a brave position towards Yiddish, Hebrew, the Land of Israel, religion and institutional Judaism.

A New Orientation

In order for the secular Yiddishist schools to return as a dynamic force in our lives, the theorists must come to a reappraisal, concerning the organization of the schools, but even more with regard to ideology. And, perhaps if the theorists dare to make an ideological reappraisal, I believe a reorganization of the schools will necessarily follow. But I have to admit that when it comes to reappraising, our radicals are the most conservative people in the world.

The first reappraisal has to be of Yiddish. We all talk about the future of Yiddish. We scream, we wail, and we “fight” for Yiddish. But the truth is that the Yiddishists have conceded the premise that Yiddish is going under, will go under, and that’s it; history has decided.

I have a letter in front of me from one of the pillars of Yiddish literature. A writer with fifty-five years of experience. The old theoretician writes to me in the following words:

“Yiddishism has attained its goal (it has won prestige for Yiddish and a following for Yiddish literature), and Yiddish? Yiddish lives and will live after all our deaths. If not in the mouths, then in the hearts of Jews (including those who did not speak Yiddish).”

It was only intended as a private letter, but now, after his death, I can disclose the name of the author: Shmuel Niger. And here is a selection from a review of Mani Leyb’s poems in the Forverts, written by the poet David Einhorn:

“A poet like him, who was able to erect such a wonderful tombstone for a whole people— his poems will not be forgotten, and they will continue to ring out in another language, when his great-grandson discovers it in our great historical archive.” (Forv. Oct. 22, 1955)

If the intelligentsia maintains that Yiddish is already done, but for the chanting of the Kaddish, then how can one continue to hold onto and fight for the Yiddish schools?

I remarked earlier that the directors no longer employ a “gutn ovnt,” “gut shabes,” a “gute vokh”, but use only Hebrew expressions, “shalom,” “shabat-shalom,” etc. Maybe the reader smiled at my making a fuss over such trivial things. But these are symptoms of a particular condition, of which the illness itself is a lot more serious than the outward signs.

If we really want to hold onto the Yiddish schools, we must take a position towards the whole matter of Hebrew. I ask you to keep in mind the distinction of “the matter of Modern Hebrew [hebreyish]”, not “the matter of the Holy Tongue [loshn-koydesh]”.

That Hebrew has become the official language of the State of Israel, I believe, is a huge minus for the state. Personally I feel that the choice of Hebrew was, in a historical perspective a mistake, a misfortune. But history does not ask us what is good and what is bad for the people. History has its own way. The adoption of Hebrew has laid a heavy burden on the community of the State of Israel. A new burden has been added, on top of all the other difficulties and yokes, of creating a modern spoken language from the old Holy Tongue. A huge amount of energy will have to be wasted on this. This will sap the creativity of the Jewish community in the State of Israel for a good while. But this is the Yishuv’s problem; if this is what they want then we accept it. But we here in the diaspora cannot accept Modern Hebrew as our national language: first, because historically it has been shown that here, in America, not a single ethnic group has been able to hold onto its own language and create its own literature, due to the fact that the language is spoken in the old home country. Yiddish and loshn-koydesh have been able to be generative here because both languages were not bound to a particular land.

Secondly, in a generation or two, Modern Hebrew will have nothing to do with the holy tongue of the Tanakh, Mishnah, and not even modern Hebrew literature, which was created in the diaspora. ^{3 3} For more about this idea, see Yidn tsvishn felker by Solomon Simon, p. 107; Dovid Kimkhi, HaDoar, Kheshvan, 5707 [1947] no 41; Tokh yidishkayt by Solomon Simon, the chapter “Our Own Language and Speaking Yiddish,” and Leo Kennig, “Vidergeburt fun folk un shprakh”, in Tsukunft, November, 1955. For us loshn-koydesh is important because the language binds us to our Jewish sources and to Jewish continuity. Modern Hebrew, on the other hand, breaks our continuity and stresses the importance of land. Yiddish, in contrast with Modern Hebrew, emphasizes that Judaism can flourish and live anywhere. Modern Hebrew denies it.

We should not be afraid to say openly: In the diaspora Yiddish is our everyday language; not just because there are still a large number of Jews who speak Yiddish and a still greater number who understand the language, a much greater number than those who speak and understand Hebrew. Rather, Yiddish is our language on account of the idea of the diaspora, because Yiddish is not linked to a narrow nationalism, rooted in the land, because Yiddish emphasizes continuity.

And therefore we do not study Modern Hebrew [hebreyish] in our schools in the diaspora, only traditional Hebrew [loshn-koydesh], with the pronunciation of our old tradition—the Ashkenazic, not the Sephardic. We study loshn-koydesh, because we want to emphasize the foundations of the Jewish people: Tanakh and Mishnah. We study loshn-koydesh because we want to be connected with the past and with the community of the Land of Israel, which will have to reintroduce the study of loshn-koydesh one day, because Modern Hebrew will cause loshn-koydesh to be forgotten. But above all, we must emphasize that Yiddish remains our language, because Modern Hebrew cannot become the language of any community in the diaspora; Modern Hebrew means an even narrower nationalism, that must be bound to a land, as all languages are, with the exception of Yiddish.

If we adopt this line of thinking we will be able to develop a militant Yiddishism. Not a battle with the community of the State of Israel, but a battle against the thoughtless defeatism here among ourselves. If we emphasize this ideology of Yiddish, we will have a weapon with which to fight. One cannot become militant merely on behalf of a sentiment; for example, Yiddish is the language of the martyrs, the language of our parents, or of the working masses. These are sentiments that have value only for human beings who have nostalgia for the past and who have themselves lived in that prehistoric era. By the way, all these sentiments can easily be disputed.

The second reorientation must come with regard to the State of Israel. We need to admit and emphasize that the emergence of the State of Israel is the most important event of our time. But we must also emphasize that we do not accept the Zionist ideology, and we must do so as often as we can. I mean that we do not accept the Zionist way of thinking, that the Jewish people can flourish, endure, and be creative only in their own land.

The founding of the State of Israel has normalized the Jews, in a certain way. In our lives, we lacked our own country, where the idea of Jewishness/Judaism could also develop in a completely Jewish environment; in an environment where Jews would take on responsibility for the necessary evils of statehood. Now that we have a country, we have such an environment. Whether Yiddishkeit will be able to withstand the pressure of these national commitments is still an open question. According to the way the world is set up now, running a country of our own cannot take the ethical values of the Tanakh and Mishnah into account. We can imagine that it could actually be the Jews in the State of Israel who will lose their distinctiveness. Judaism in the diaspora obliges one to adhere to a particular way of life; it is not necessarily so in the Jews’ own country.

We need to declare openly and clearly: The diaspora is not an accident, but just the opposite; wrestling with the surrounding foreign culture in the diaspora is a part of Judaism, of the Jewish worldview. We ought not to be apologetic that we do not live in the State of Israel. We must say clearly: We are here, because we think that Judaism is an idea that can prevail anywhere, can flourish all over the world wherever a Jewish community finds itself. The Jews who contend that the Jewish people, like all other people, consists of a community that lives in one country, under one flag, speaks one language, because a true people must be uniform; these Jews should strive to leave the diaspora. If they stay in the diaspora, they will have to establish their lives as one establishes temporary housing. But we, the Yiddishists, contend that the communities in the diaspora are not temporary housing.

At the current moment the State of Israel stands in the center of our attention and concern. But we must emphasize that it is so, not because the State of Israel is the only genuine Jewish settlement, but because the State of Israel finds itself in need. When any Jewish population finds itself in danger and need, it becomes the center of our attention. But the Jewish People is more than any given Jewish population, more than any one geographic place.

If we were to openly assume this attitude towards the People of Israel it would help us deepen our Jewish lives. The feelings of helplessness, uselessness, and temporariness will drop away. We would not always have to stand, hat in hand, and excuse ourselves for our lives and our creative contributions in the diaspora.

The emphasis, that the diaspora is a part of our Jewish spiritual country, will also help weaken our keen and narrow nationalism which, I believe, is a danger for our spiritual and physical survival.

Thirdly, Yiddishist schools need to be reintroduced into the traditional framework of a bes-medresh where study and religion go together. Obviously, this is the most difficult thing for our radicals. As soon as a Jewish radical hears the word religion or faith, he becomes terrified. For him this means only one thing: the superstitions of the small shtetl, which contended that a person’s every twist and turn is dependent on an angry God. He, the Most High, sits on his divine throne and watches over a Jew to see whether he cuts his nails on the right day, in the right order, and whether he does the right thing with the clippings or not. Our freethinkers are still battling with the overseer from the Yeshiva who would not let them read an unauthorized book, or with their father who smacked them for carrying a handkerchief in their pocket on Shabbos. After everything they still do not understand that, “For a much greater and more significant proportion of modern people, religion is first and foremost a meaningful, social and ethical phenomenon which stands for a historical expression of the world-view of a particular group” (Dr. S. Margoshes). There are others, such as, for example, Professor Julius Gutman, who contend that Judaism has within itself a particular way of viewing the world that is of great importance to modern man, both in its relationship to God and in its relationship to humankind.

The Yiddishist schools must become bote-midroshim. There will be an open door for the secularists who sneak into synagogues. It will also be a justification for religious studies in the school curriculum. It will not be a bar mitzvah for the sake of bringing in more boys, it would be a bar mitzvah in which the ceremony will at the least be conducted in the school proper. An oyneg shabes will not be merely an abstract ceremony, unconnected to any concrete Shabbos observance, but it will be linked for those who want to attend the Friday evening service.

Transforming the schools into bote-midroshim will bring about another important alteration. Judaism among the secularists will cease to be a museum-Judaism. It’s truly comical to see how a Jew of ours stands on Shabbos, without a yarmulke and smoking (a clean-shaven man, you understand), and speaks with anger and scorn about the Reform and Conservative Jews; which for him is a watered-down Judaism. Because they do not behave like the strictly Orthodox; it is no copy of the way synagogue was conducted in the old shtetl Judaism.

The complainers themselves never practice at all. For them any form of religion is off-limits. But then? Sometimes one of them longs for his younger days and years. In those moments he wants none other than a Judaism like the one he saw in his childhood. For him, Judaism is not a living being, to which the law of evolution applies. For him, Judaism is a museum piece. If the secularists begin leading bote-midroshim, and the day-to-day pragmatic questions of Jewish religion will come up for them, they will not be so backwards and afraid of every alteration. These very same secularists, who pour boiling oil on any changes in Judaism, and who themselves observe nothing, do not understand that Judaism is a striving towards wholeness, which does not come easily. Jews have arrived at the Pharisaical concretization of the prophets through torture, pain, soul torment and wrestling. ^{4 4} The term “concretization” was important to Simon. He felt that what most distinguishes Judaism is not the spiritual idea or moral teaching per se, but its translation into practice, into Halakhah. This process is the only way to reconcile the demand for transcendence with the contingencies of daily life. It is not unalterably imposed from above but dynamic, worked out over time by the rabbis and the folk. See, for example, the chapter, “Di shrek far psukim,” in Tokh yidishkayt, Buenos Aires, 1954. Drawing from these reserves, whether from the old Judaism or from the new streams, cannot be done without trying out every change, every substitution for oneself.

I would actually label these bote-midroshim, these selfsame congregations, with a Hebrew name, as is always the custom among Jews, “Anoshe Yidish” or “Anoshe Yidishkayt”(People of Yiddish or People of Yiddishkayt). The central organization I would call the “Union of the Congregations of the People of Yiddishkayt.” These congregations would be able to become the home for Yiddish and Yiddishishts. There would not only be Yiddish schools in the bote-midroshim of “Anshey Yiddishkayt,” but in each building there would be a library. It would become the home for study groups, reading circles, and all the Yiddish cultural activities in the area would be conducted there. All campaigns, for the Congress for Jewish Culture, for YIVO, for the Yiddish Dictionary, Yiddish Book Month, collections for the State of Israel, for Pioneer Women, for Hadassah— everything would be there.

Historically, Jewish communal life has never been conducted without two institutions: the bes-medresh, and the the cemetery. The secularists have taken on cemeteries, but no bes-medresh.

In such a center, which would gather all Yiddishist Jews around itself, there would not be a Kheyder-Shul [i.e. “one room schoolhouse”] with one teacher. They would be able to have a day school there, and an afternoon school, and a Sunday school, too, even a regional high school. Yiddishism would become a part of the greater Jewish Community. As it stands it is a tiny stream that runs off to the side and does not flow into the great ocean of Judaism.

I know the difficulties. We are limited in strength. Not only do we lack Yiddishist intellectuals, who are capable of leading such bote-midroshim centers, but we have very few teachers. The teachers with great Yiddish knowledge are growing older. The new teachers know little and are few in number. Nowadays it’s really something to have an assistant teacher or a head teacher who is a graduate of one of the secular high schools. We have even lived to see the day when a principal of a Yiddishist Sunday school cannot read or write any Yiddish, cannot speak it, but can understand it.

We rush to fill positions. We grab a teacher, any teacher, and a locale, whatever locale, and we open a school, any kind of school in the new neighborhoods where our young people have moved. When we succeed in opening a “three-day” school there, we are in seventh heaven. For us, it’s also okay to have a school in the rooms of a public school, where it is impossible to proceed with the work even according to our own old model. For us, a Sunday school is also fine.

There can be no illusions about the effectiveness our Yiddishism can have there. How could that compete with the rich, new, well-laid-out Jewish centers that are being run by professional administrators?

Therefore, we must now reorganize our schools and, in the meantime, put our limited strength to use in the best way possible. We have to give up the tiny schools in the storefronts, in the cellars and the attics and in the public schools that swallow up a tremendous amount of money and strength. We need to found several, if necessary even a very limited number of model community schools of the “Anoshe Yidishkayt” as earlier described. In these select institutions we will install our best teachers. The teachers with the most Yiddish knowledge. The Jews with the deepest roots. We must not have any more “one-room schoolhouses” with one teacher. These select teachers will be able to begin to introduce a planned, great cultural work within the framework of Jewish faith.

Yes, it is a daring plan. It is a new path, a complete break from our old familiar one. But we have, after all, called ourselves radicals. We are the ones who did not shrink from breaking with our former lives. Why should we be afraid of change now?

Let us quit fooling ourselves. The Yiddishist schools are not going under yet, but they are falling apart. All that is now left to us is the husk of the organization. The core is missing. We still have the remnants of a Yiddishist public. Let us not squander what still remains to us. Had we reorganized our school system twenty-five years ago, or even fifteen years ago, we would now be in possession of a deep Yiddishist movement and a thriving community life. Now is still not too late. But the shadows are growing longer and longer. Let us take heed.