The burial society was not the only Jewish institution that the plutocrats took over and made their own. In order to make possible the German-style choral synagogue that they sought to establish, a group of notables apparently engineered the takeover of an existing traditional prayer house. The complicated history of the Kiev Choral Synagogue illustrates the growing rift between wealthy, russified Jewish merchants and industrialists and their maskilic hangers-on and the unacculturated Jewish majority of the city.
The image projected by the traditional prayer houses, and those who prayed in them, was clearly a source of anxiety for some Jews in Kiev— and not only there. In 1869 (perhaps after a trip to Kiev?), alexander Tse-derbaum, editor of the Odessa-based Hebrew Ha-melits and the yiddish Kol mevaser, berated Kiev's Jews (particularly Hasidim) for attracting attention by insisting on wearing heavy prayer shawls and traditional Sabbath garments in the street even in the summer. Kiev had no eruv (ritual boundary to mark off a symbolic private space to enable one to bypass the prohibition of carrying on the Sabbath) and carrying on Sabbath was thus forbidden. Tseder-baum wrote,
We don't even want to talk about what a Christian says when he sees such get-ups; the Jew doesn't even care what the Christian thinks, even though he's living in a really Christian city (ekht kristlikhe shtodt) and our wise men have said that in a majority-Christian city, Jews should not dress to attract attention.151
Tsederbaum's real gripe was with traditionalist rabbis, who insisted that Jews continue to wear the clothing that Jews in Eastern Europe had been wearing for centuries instead of allowing them to dress as their Christian neighbors did. But the trope resurfaced again in the Jewish press, as publicists tried to impress upon Kiev's Jews that they represented Jewry and Judaism to one of the most important audiences in the empire, and should act accordingly. a year later, a local Jew complained in a letter to Kol mevaser that "the places where Jews gather to pray in Kiev are shameful"—temporary rented quarters next to pubs that were often littered with garbage.152 "How do we look to the other residents of the city, to the Christians, who consider the church to be such a holy place?" he asked. "How can people have a better opinion of us if we ourselves do not protect our own honor?" The only respectable place of worship were the rooms rented by a few householders (balebotim) in Podol for the High Holy Days, but that was simply not enough for a city with so many Jews, both residents and passers-through. By 1880, there were four authorized prayer houses in Kiev, only one of which was in Ploskaia, a fact that makes it beyond certain that there were many more existing under-ground.153
There is evidence that the Jewish elite of Kiev began a quest to establish their own prayer house as early as 1867, only a few years after Jews were officially readmitted to the city. In 1866, Kievlianin made mention of a "communal synagogue" where the merchants worshiped, and the next year, Rabbi Tsukkerman petitioned for permission to rent a facility "expressly for the Jewish merchantry" in which the latter could hold services—seemingly so they would not have to mix with the poorer artisan folk.154 (In a letter to the chief of police two years later, Tsukkerman criticized the modes of worship he had observed in three prayer houses in Podol and Ploskaia: "There is noise and disorder, [and] behavior is permitted that is inappropriate for a holy place, such as the smoking of tobacco and the like. There are often arguments between parishioners.")155 The proposed prayer house was to be located in Podol, where we may assume most Jewish merchants were living at that time.156 Just a few years later, Tsederbaum called the erection of a synagogue in Kiev "one of the greatest needs" of the local Jewish community.157
By 1880, thirty petitioners calling themselves the "educated constituency" of Kiev Jewry requested permission to open their own synagogue, not in Podol but in the center of the city, where there were already more than one hundred Jewish homes.158 The petition was rejected, but they tried again six years later. In addition to the problem of location—most of the petitioners lived in the central Dvortsovaia and Starokievskaia districts, too far to walk to the existing prayer houses in the outlying neighborhoods—the request explained that
The internal configuration of the aforementioned prayer houses does not conform to the contemporary religious requirements of educated Jews because of the absence of choral singing and, in general, that order in divine worship which has already been introduced into Jewish prayer houses in several important Russian cities such as Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and others.159
Choral singing and orderly worship, the two elements missing from services in the prayer houses, were construed not only as desiderata of the petitioners, but as requirements. From their perspective, worshiping in a traditional prayer house was no longer a possibility; they had to have their own synagogue. Thus, they clearly differentiated themselves from the masses of Jews in Kiev: they were "educated" Jews who desired "order" in worship. The desire for an orderly and regularized service is remarkably similar to Osip Rabinovich's depiction (written over thirty years earlier) of the reaction of the young maskil to services in the local prayer house: "The very format of the prayers, with violent cries, hand clapping, convulsive movements, without any system, as if in the forest, evoked in us not reverence but horror."160 Seemingly, little had changed in the traditional Jewish prayer house, prompting the same horrified response in generation after generation of educated Russian Jews. Rather than attend such an institution, the wealthiest of Kiev's Jews requested and received permission to establish chapels or prayer quorums in their own homes; others apparently preferred to worship at home on an individual basis rather than attend a prayer house, a practice reminiscent of Moses Mon-tefiore's private synagogue on the grounds of his Ramsgate estate.161
The petition went on to aver that without a modern synagogue, the younger generation—which was not attending services at all—"is thus deprived of the moral support that all find in religion and can more easily fall prey to pernicious influences."162 We learn, then, that even if the heads of families were attending services at a private home, their children and other younger Jews (students, for example, who were explicitly named in a later petition) were not, and evidently had no other consistent or reliable link to Judaism at all. Indeed, an 1893 report in the Hebrew press on the progress in the matter of the choral synagogue voiced the hope that the new institution would attract the Jewish students of the city, who usually spent their Sabbath mornings in Kiev's cafes.163 Another observer went so far as to claim that the students did not know anything about Judaism—indeed, the very spirit of Judaism was foreign to them—and that a modern-style synagogue was the only hope for attracting them to services, for they would never attend the traditional prayer houses with their antiquated customs, so distasteful to modern sensibilities. Moreover, the new synagogue promised not only to draw them to worship but also back to Judaism and the Jewish world in general, for "if they come to a modern synagogue, they will learn from the rabbi about the principles of the faith, topics in Jewish history, Sabbath and holidays, and they will honor God and love their people.164
For many, then, the choral synagogue promised to be the key to a Jewish future for the acculturated Jews of Kiev: by establishing a respectable Jewish presence in the very heart of the city, it held a promise to stop the flow of assimilation. As maskil Yitshak Yaakov Vaysberg wrote, the new synagogue would be a spiritual center for all the maskilim of the city, not just a theater where diploma-holders would pray once a year. Moreover, the synagogue would be a symbol and model of enlightened Judaism for Kiev's unenlightened Jews, a "holy setting" without such "shameful and disgusting" customs as "chattering and gossiping" during services as were to be found in the Hasidic synagogues.165 In addition, some Kiev Jews felt that a decorous synagogue housed in a beautiful building in the center of the city was only appropriate for one of the leading Jewish communities of the empire.166 It would serve a political purpose, wrote Israel Darewski, to improve the image of Jews in the eyes of other Russian subjects, so that in Kiev, "a city that is majority Christian. . . our Christian neighbors will see that we are called by the name of God." He envisioned high-level bureaucrats being invited to the synagogue on the emperor's birthday to behold the loyalty of Jews as they prayed for the ruler and his kingdom.167
After having received permission to hold their own high holiday services for several years in succession, the group—including Tsukkerman, L. I. Brodsky, and four others—submitted yet another request for permission to establish their own synagogue in 1893, this time apparently citing the crowded conditions at their current prayer house, the Chizik Synagogue, as justification for a new one.168 According to Eliezer Friedmann, Chizik had good connections with the chief of police, and the merchants and householders who prayed in his synagogue probably did so because of its central location, close to the city center, but also, perhaps, because of Chizik's connections; Friedmann observed that all the synagogue's parishioners kowtowed to Chizik.169 In his denial of the petition, the governor remarked that outside of the high holidays, the "Jewish intelligentsia and students" would simply have to worship at one of Kiev's twelve licit prayer houses. They could not establish their own because the law set the number of Jewish prayer houses in Kiev at that number. An appeal to the governor-general was also rejected, the response calling into the question the petitioners' stated motivation for desiring a new prayer house: if the current space was "truly" crowded, they should simply request to move it to a new location.170 Given the group's many previous entreaties and justifications on the matter, the governor-general had good reason to suspect that its members were concerned not so much with the spaciousness of their surroundings as they were with separating from other Kiev Jews and creating their own place of worship.
The group took the governor-general's advice—but gave it their own particular spin. Two years later, in 1895, they applied not to establish a new prayer house but to move an existing one to a new location. Having left the Chizik Synagogue and become parishioners of an artisans' prayer house in the delapidated Shmidt Building, they requested authorization to relocate to a new plot of land purchased only several months before by Lazar’ Brodsky. Since the only existing building on that plot was also too old to be used for their purposes, they suggested tearing it down and erecting a new one. A1-though the local authorities denied the request, noting that the government had already ruled that no choral synagogue could be built in any part of Kiev, an appeal to the Senate was successful, that body agreeing that the proposed plan was no more than a relocation of an existing prayer house. Thus, permission was finally obtained for the long-awaited choral synagogue—which was officially not a synagogue at all but only a prayer house, albeit to be housed in a grand Romanesque edifice.171
Examining the protocols for board elections at the two prayer houses from 1890, we discover that the first, the Chizik Synagogue, was for both merchants and artisans, while the second, in the Shmidt Building, was solely for artisans, the majority of whom were illiterate.172 By 1895, however, the notables involved in the choral synagogue petition had not only joined the Shmidt artisans' prayer house but even formed a majority on its governing board.173 There seems little doubt that these men engineered their takeover of the prayer house precisely in order to move it or, more accurately, to recreate it, at a new location—the grand edifice that they planned to build on the plot that Brodsky had purchased. The takeover was facilitated by new regulations for the elections of prayer house boards in Kiev introduced by the government in 1895, on the model of those for St. Petersburg: parishioners wishing to vote had to contribute a minimum of 10 rubles a year to gain eligibility, a sum that few artisans could afford.174 Perhaps some or even most of the original members of the prayer house were pleased that so many notable Kiev Jews had joined their shul, but if they were at all traditionally oriented in their approach to prayer and Jewish custom, they could not have been happy with the style of worship in the new Choral Synagogue (see chapter 4 for more on the details of the innovations introduced there).
Comprehending the government's role in the choral synagogue episode, whether as active participant or passive observer, enhances our understanding of its ambivalent attitude toward Jewish society and its constituent groups. In the 1890s, the government was clearly bent on restricting authority within the Jewish community to the wealthy elite, as demonstrated by the creation of the Representation for Jewish Welfare and the introduction of eligibility requirements for synagogue board elections. Similarly, in 1894 the provincial administration (gubernskoe pravlenie) reaffirmed that only Jews with permanent residence rights were allowed to vote in Kiev rabbinical elections.175 This was natural for a state that was ever more fearful of its impoverished Jewish masses and the revolutionary tendencies they were assumed to harbor. at the same time, however, in other ways it seemed to support broader participation of all Jews in Jewish institutions. Thus, it maintained the regulations allowing all prayer house parishioners in a given community, regardless of their income level, to vote in elections for Crown rabbis and even required that those regulations be applied to Kiev when it discovered in 1901 that the city's prayer houses were not abiding by them.176 In a similar vein, we have seen that at least one bureaucrat voiced fears that the existing law on prayer house boards would enable "Jewish capitalists" to maintain control in the Jewish community and influence their poorer coreligionists for the worse. In formulating his response to the elite's request to build its choral synagogue, the governor-general wrote that the establishment of such an institution would lead to an undesirable increase in Jewish migration to the city, given "the influence of the local Jewish merchants on their fellow tribesmen {edinoplemenniki)." At the same time, because the government maintained that a certain amount of autonomous activity on the part of the masses could be—indeed, had to be—tolerated as long it was regulated, a certain number of prayer houses had to be allowed to prevent the multiplication of secret prayer quorums, which would encourage "the development of isolation, fanaticism, and superstition among the Jewish masses.177 In sum, the tsarist government trusted wealthy Jews only marginally more than their poor coreligionists; the former had to be entrusted with communal leadership, but would probably exploit their wards, while the latter were still unfit to be integrated into Russian society, and their communal and religious activities had to be closely supervised.
World History
