That the Representation for Jewish Welfare, despite its newly elected status, was still a stronghold of the plutocratic establishment is made clear by its relationship with the Kiev branch of the OPE. In 1907, the year after the coup that replaced the old guard leadership of the organization with nationalists, the OPE requested 11,000 rubles from the kosher tax revenues—but received only 4,000 toward its library and adult education activities (a sum that was later further reduced). The Representation explained that it could not grant funds to the OPE for support of Jewish schools in Kiev since all Jewish education in the city was under the exclusive purview of the Representation itself.157 Clearly, the Representation was not about to allow the parvenu OPE to encroach upon its territory, and that hostility was probably aggravated in the minds of some of the wealthier Representation members by the memory of the previous year's coup.
But the OPE, in turn, resolved that if it could not give financial assistance to Kiev's schools, it would at least provide them with "moral" support—in other words, organizational assistance. To this end, its schools commission began consulting with individual school boards about how they might petition the government for legalization and thus do away with the semi-legal limbo in which they had existed for years. This was to be the first step toward the eventual unification of the schools into some sort of integral educational system that would be managed by the OPE. But the OPE went even further, entering into discussions with the school boards about an institutional linkage between the boards and the OPE itself, whereby members of the school boards would sit on the OPE's schools commission and the commission, in turn, would send one of its members to each of the boards. The agreement also stipulated that, although responsibility for the financial wellbeing of each school still rested with the individual school boards, the OPE would have oversight over the schools' budgets. Presumably, this arrangement would correct what the OPE called the schools' "abnormal existence" due to lack of regulation or communal supervision. In effect, then, the OPE was planning a virtual takeover of Jewish education in Kiev—in direct violation of the Representation for Jewish Welfare's directive that the city's Jewish schools remain under its direction alone. The OPE was also demonstrating that leadership in communal affairs was not dependent on money alone, but also on the initiative and innovation that it felt the Representation lacked— for clearly the schools were cooperating with the OPE despite the fact that they had received no funding from it at all (surely this had at least something to do with the leftist leanings of many Jewish teachers, who had been an active force at many of the crucial OPE meetings in 1906). Moreover, in 1907 the OPE also submitted a petition to the authorities for permission to establish four of its own Jewish schools in Kiev, plainly another attempt to stake out a place for itself in an arena that officially belonged to the Representation for Jewish Welfare.158
In 1908, the Representation for Jewish Welfare answered the OPE's actions by slashing its subsidy for the coming year in half, to 2,000 rubles. OPE activist Tsitron charged that the cut was "an act of revenge,"159 while the society's board appealed to the Representation to restore its funding and even to transfer sums designated for the boards of Kiev's Jewish schools to the OPE, for the purpose of creating a "unified schools commission" with a uniform curriculum for all schools.160 As before, the issue of public accountability was central, the OPE calling itself "the only legal Jewish educational institution in Russia working under the permanent oversight of the Jewish population." Significantly, the OPE seemed to propose a quid pro quo, offering the Representation the opportunity for oversight over the educational society's activities in return, as it were, for supplemental funding and the right to govern Jewish education in Kiev through the unified schools commis-sion.161 At the same time, despite the OPE board's repeated insistence that it was not interested in subsidizing schools in Kiev because of the Representation's policy of exclusive control, it announced plans to grant a subsidy to one of those schools, which would then come under the jurisdiction of the OPE schools commission.162
At the general meeting of the OPE membership of October 21, 1908, M. L. Tsitron introduced a resolution to appeal to the municipal authorities to overturn the Representation's cuts in the OPE allocation; others, however, urged peaceful means to resolve this intra-Jewish quarrel, and the resolution did not pass.163 This turn of events points to a subtle shift in the course of Jewish communal politics and leadership: activists with a tendency to be outspoken, idiosyncratic, and even choleric such as Lur’e and Tsitron had no qualms about appealing to the Russian authorities for redress. Lur’e's semiofficial position in the government bureaucracy only made that path more appealing to him, for his authority as Crown rabbi came from the state itself. However, the OPE, an organization with a clear nationalist orientation, not only had no links to the state but was also constantly engaged in struggles to extract more rights and funding from the government for Jewish education; moreover, many of its officers had been active in the revolutionary movement and continued to be hostile to the tsarist regime. The majority's choice to keep the battle with the Representation within the fold, then, may well be characteristic of the new brand of Russian Jewish welfare, educational, and cultural organizations that became prevalent throughout the empire in this period.
If the OPE saw itself as pitted against the state, why—we might ask— did it continue to seek funding from the Representation for Jewish Welfare, which was, after all, an organ of the Kiev municipal government? It might have seemed more logical to break away from any dependence on the Representation. There was a different logic at work here, however. As board member L. E. Mandel’berg reported to the Central Committee of the OPE in St. Petersburg in 1908, relying solely on charitable donations or philanthropic institutions for support would not enable the OPE to achieve its goals and, indeed, was contrary to the very principles on which the society was based.164 Receiving a subsidy from the kosher tax revenues that the Representation for Jewish Welfare distributed represented the support of the Jewish people itself for the OPE's activities. In an ideal society, Mandel’berg explained, universal education would be financed through universal and equitable taxes, but since the current state of affairs instead imposed a very inequitable tax, namely the kosher tax, the most that could be done was to use it correctly: to ensure that the money taken from the poor masses was used for their spiritual and material needs. One of the most pressing needs, in the eyes of the OPE leaders, was education, a vision that Representation members clearly did not share; Mandel’berg noted that they had given less than 10 percent of the kosher tax revenues to education-related causes. He also commented on the hypocrisy of the Representation members in denying the OPE funding because some of its activities took place outside of Kiev, when free Jewish medical institutions in Kiev, funded heavily with kosher tax money, served primarily non-Kievans.
A more cynical interpretation might be that the OPE was simply lacking the money it needed to carry out its activities, and had to have recourse to the kosher excise funds to survive; Mandel’berg's explanation was as good as any. In any case, there was clearly ambivalence about receiving kosher excise funds: while they were a symbol of popular support for an organization or cause, they also meant having to dirty one's hands in Jewish communal politics, tussle with the conservative leadership of the community, and fight government bureaucrats for a greater share of the wealth.165
World History
