Conclusion

The opening of Kiev, in the very heart of the Pale of Settlement, to limited Jewish residence put tsarist officials in an impossible bind. Some Jews met the requirements for a residence permit and were able to take up legal residence in the city, but even more did not meet those requirements and decided to take their chances. Thus, from the very beginning an entire caste of Jews lived an existence in the shadows, hoping that bribing the right policemen and hiding in the attic during police raids would be enough to keep themselves in Kiev for another few months. Even Jews who entered the city legally could find their situation transformed overnight; if their child graduated from school, for example (parents of children attending school in Kiev were granted residence permits), or if their occupation was declared no longer in the category of "craft." Official figures can only tell us so much about a Jewish life—religious, economic, and otherwise—which tried so hard to stay out of view. On the other end of the spectrum, we witness the growing visibility of the "most favored" Jewish denizens of the city: the first-guild merchants living in sumptuous houses in Lipki and riding through the city in their carriages. No wonder some Christians felt uneasy about a city they felt was rightfully "Russian" and "Christian": the Jewish contribution to the city's economy and everyday hustle and bustle grew by the day, and even official statistics—which described an explosion in Kiev's Jewish population in the 1860s and 1870s, climbing to about 13,000 in 1874, or 12 percent of the total population—clearly did not correspond to the true number of Jews in the city. This was especially true in the neighborhoods where Jews had already achieved the heroic proportions similar to those of heavily Jewish Odessa and Warsaw. But imperial Russia was not a police state, and sometimes there seemed to be more cracks than actual bricks and mortar in the legislative and administrative walls it attempted to put up. If this was ever the case, it was certainly so with the regulations governing Jewish entry into and settlement in Kiev.

As we will see in the next chapter, the visibility of Kiev's Jewish elite, and their quest for a sense of rootedness and permanence in their adopted city, meant that their religious and communal institutions would almost always have to be above board and subject to official review and approval. Working-class Jews, by contrast, would often find that their petitions to establish Jewish institutions—such as the Vasil’kover mutual-aid society that we saw above—were summarily rejected. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of those institutions were organized and run secretly, which, while a useful state of affairs for the members of those institutions, makes knowing anything about them extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for historians. It is with that caveat in mind that we proceed to take a close look at some of Kiev's central—and legal—Jewish institutions in the first two decades of Jewish settlement in the city.