The "electoral principle" was now so central a principle in Jewish life that it even extended to the religious sphere. In 1907, a group of poor parishioners of a Kiev prayer house submitted a petition to the authorities requesting that the usual minimum annual dues of 10 rubles required to participate in synagogue board elections be lowered, since most working-class Jews could not afford such a sum:
All of us parishioners would like those elected as members of the board to be worthy individuals from the ranks of the poor parishioners, who form the majority of the worshipers. Among the parishioners, who are made up mostly of artisans, there are very few paying dues of 10 rubles. Three-quarters of the parishioners pay 3 rubles and higher, but do not have the right to participate in the elections. . . . We are pained that we cannot participate in the elections and thus concede the fate of the prayer house to a small group of prosperous individuals, who have only their personal interests in mind and do not care about us.151
The revolution had come to the synagogue. These petitioners were no longer working on the assumption that those with more money should automatically be granted the privilege of governing an institution, for, in a break from the past, it was no longer taken for granted that the wealthy understood the needs of the poor and worked in their best interest. The only truly deciding factor was that poor Jews formed the majority of parishioners, and should thus control the "fate" of their prayer house. And it was no mistake that they insisted that "worthy" men could not only be drawn from the ranks of the wealthy—poor men could be worthy too.
Several petitions relating to the rabbinical elections of 1906 further demonstrate the growing importance attached to elections and universal suffrage. The provincial authorities received memorials from parishioners of two Podol prayer houses, charging that elections for rabbinical electors (who would then elect the Crown rabbi) had been based on corrupted parishioner lists and should be invalidated.152 In both cases, the complainants alleged that a small group of parishioners had seized control of the governance of their prayer house against the will of the majority. One petition asserted that at Prayer House No. 10, "it is convenient and profitable [or advantageous, vygodno] for a small handful of bosses that all elections at the prayer house and its entire governance depend exclusively on those bosses and their stooges, and not on the masses of parishioners."153 As in the previous example, the assumption here was that the governance of the prayer house should, by rights, be vested firmly in the majority. The issue of class also seems to have been at play, at least at Prayer House No. 10, judging from the petitioners' claim that only those parishioners who had contributed to the prayer house had been invited to participate in the elections when, as the document stressed as its very first point, the law of 1901 allowed all parishioners to vote for rabbinical electors—"without any relation to how much one or another parishioner contributes to the prayer house or even contributes anything at all."154
The complainants asserted that the ruling clique had been voted off of the prayer house governing board in 1904, but had refused to yield power to the new board. The fact that a complaint was only being registered now, in 1906, points again to the influence of the events of 1905 and the much-heightened sensitivity within the Jewish community to issues of representation, suffrage, and equity in communal governance. The vocabulary chosen to express the outrage of those who felt they had been wronged was similar or identical to that used in other communal battles that we have seen: those who were accused of holding power illegitimately were called "cliques" {kuchki) of "pretenders," their actions "arbitrary," the elections they had corrupted "illegal" and "unlawful," and those they had harmed "the general masses of parishioners."155
Politics was even inserting itself into the life of the elite Merchants' Synagogue, founded and patronized by Lev Brodsky. A 1906 report related that a worshiper had intended to make an announcement about an upcoming boycott of a local Black Hundreds member, but was prevented from speaking by the synagogue wardens, just as on other occasions they had stopped Zionists and Territorialists from giving political speeches—even when they had received permission from Brodsky. In one instance, the speaker was dragged off the pulpit and the police called.156 No aspect or arena of Jewish life was immune from politicization.
World History
