Learning from them

The choice of the girls and young women

Through this group, we intend to pay a tribute to the whole community of Telz by creating a work that explores their lives, their education, and their town. Returning these 500 young people to their home as part of the history of their city, of Ashkenazi Jewish society, of Lithuania, is an attempt to bring them back once and for all from the anonymous night of their death, to give them back a place in history as individuals, as women, as members of a collective – simply put, as human beings.

Documenting the lives of the young girls and women from Telz is more than ever necessary.

A town devoted to education

The research about the educational context of Telz highlights the very special atmosphere of a town saturated with educational institutions – famous among observant Jews, Orthodox and non-Orthodox. Yet, reading the Sefer Telz reveals intellectual and spiritual aspects of the cultural life of this big shtetl that blur the lines usually drawn between religious and non-religious culture.

The Yeshivah was established in 1875 by three Orthodox rabbis. In 1884, Rabbi Eliezer Gordon, a disciple of Rabbi Israel Salanter, founder of the Mussar (ethics) movement, was appointed as the head rabbi of Telz and Rosh Yeshiva. Eliezer Gordon pioneered innovative methods of teaching and commenting on the Torah and Talmud (some of them later known as Telzer derekh) that had a crucial influence on the educational institutions founded in Telz during the next 40 years, and in all the spiritual matters of the town, in particular in introducing different levels (shiurim) of classes, the study of “mussar,” and secular studies in the yeshivah, as in the mekhinah (preparatory-level classes) established in 1920. There is a need for an in-depth study to understand with precision the influence of the different religious obediences of Jewish orthodoxy that were active in Telzer Yeshive, and in the city at large. Like in most of the large shtetlekh, every nuance of the almost unlimited Jewish political rainbow was represented in Telz. The author was often told by her mother that in her Gymnasium Yavne where she was taught Latin – and that was under the authority of Telzer Rabbinical College (of Mizrahi obedience, it means religious sionist), she participated to a circle of Agudes Yisroel (a religious opposed to Sionism party) girls, whose meaning for her was never against the idea of a land in Eretz-Israel. A scrutiny of the curriculum of the schools reveals also a powerful influence of the Mussar mouvement that has to be more thoroughly documented.

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In addition to the hederim for boys, and the four levels of classes folkshul (elementary) for the girls, a kollel (post-graduate institute) was started in 1922 to train students for the rabbinate. In 1925, a Yavneh School for teachers’ training was created and soon after, in 1927, the Gymnasium Yavneh (eight grades secondary school) for girls was established. In 1930, a women’s branch of the teachers’ training school opened, with a two-year course. The very high level of education, both secular and religious, offered by these two women’s schools attracted not only teenagers and young woman of the region, but daughters from all Lithuania and Poland who were sent by their families to Telz for its educational excellence.

Advanced pedagogy

These schools – all part of the Rabbinical College of Telz – produced a generation of highly qualified teachers whose influence spread across Europe. The testimonies of the Sefer Telz, the ones the author heard from survivors, and what she has learned from her family accounts confirm the innovative character of the pedagogy in the Orthodox network of Telz – in all its educational institutions – and especially in the girls’ and women’s schools. The Telzer Yeshiva, which was re-established in Cleveland, Ohio after WWII, is renowned worldwide, but the Gymnasium Yavne for girls, and the teachers’ seminary remain almost unknown, and need to be documented. Far from being limited to a high level of Hebrew, Biblical and religious education, the curriculum of the Gymnasium Yavne for girls included Lithuanian, Latin, German, history, geography, mathematics, natural sciences and gymnastics (the last two subjects were also taught in the elementary folkshul for girls). As we know now from the file 1382 in CENTRAL NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF LITHUANIA with their 489 documents concerning the Yavne schools for girls in Telz, teaching methods have emphasized the importance of languages and scientific education.

The grip of poverty

The father of the author has been very appreciative of what the Sefer Telz has accomplished for the Jewish survivors of this city. Only about one aspect has he expressed a slight restriction. He has always felt that little attention has been given to the grip of poverty on the Jewish population of the city, probably because of the deep nostalgy of the redactors and the witnesses for their beloved and lost community. In his memoirs published in 2004, Moishe Rozenbaumas somehow sadly remembers that at different moments of the family fortunes and misfortunes, they were lucky enough to be able to improve the daily shvartser breit (dark bred) with shmalts (goose fat) or sugar. Then, he adds that more than one family were simply satisfied when they could get the piece of dark bread. He also mentions that families were living in basements with almost no furniture. The author has often heard her father refer to the difficult living and work conditions that he experienced as an apprentice at differents tailors in Telz – from the most terrible one to the best one. Among his fond memories of his “ bosses”, the fondest relates to their wifes, the balabostes, the real heads of these Jewish households, who always treated him like a child of the family – he was more than once the only employee – meaning that he worked his 12 hours a day and was fed like any other child. More than once he was also secretly in love with one of the daughters of the family (usually, the prettiest). When Shabbes and Suday came, his greatest joy was when he was a guest at friends who were Jewish young peasants and whose parents worked on farms in the surroundings. Not only he loved the nature but, here too, the mothers looked after that he comes back home with a bucket of milk for his mother and brothers, knowing that Moishe’s father was absent. We should keep in mind this atmosphere of poverty when we look at the class photographs or at the identity photos of the certificates and diplomas. Behind their dignified pose and a smiling or sad face, the young girls may not have had a new dress each year, they may have salvage the shoes of an older sister – or wear klumpes (peasant woden shoes), they were not always well-fed when the goast of hunger was not hanging around. And a notable proportion of the students of the gymnasium Yavne dropped out after 6 or 7 years because they had to sustain their family, it was the case of Rosa Portnoi, the author’s mother and the eldest of eight siblings. During a recent encounter, one of our witnesses, the rebbetsin Shoshana Gifter (nee Shoshana Bloch), told us that arriving in the United States in 1940 with her husband Reb Gifter, a young American Rabbi trained in the Telzer Yeshiva, she wanted to study mathematics and was offered two years of credits by Harvard University. In 1933, Latin has replaced English in the language curriculum of the school, probably to comply with this higher level of scientific training. Life in Telz was permeated with the idea of decency, not only in the form of tsniyut, but as self-esteem drawn from knowledge, which was held as a crucial value among the educated girls. These educational values also permeate the accounts given by the Telzer ghetto survivors. * The Musar movement