As is often the case with the establishment of new communities, patterns set in the first years frequently remain paradigms for years to come. So it was in Kiev. A number of blueprints for communal governance and philanthropic activity were laid down in the first years of Jewish settlement; these became "tradition" in more ways than one. As we will see in this chapter, the establishment of the Jewish Hospital, the communal governing board, and the first educational institutions were all ad hoc developments that were nonetheless to have a tremendous impact on Jewish life in Kiev until the turn of the century and, in some ways, to the very end of the tsarist regime. Although the Jewish Hospital was, as its name made clear, a distinctly separate institution that was meant for the welfare of the Jewish community, it was in no way cut off from the wider life of the city and indeed maintained close ties with non-Jewish institutions and society. At the same time, it was made clear from the outset that Jewish welfare was to be funded solely from Jewish money. Christian Kiev demanded that Jews pay for their own institutions but insisted at the same time on municipal and local philanthropic oversight of those institutions. The same, it eventually emerged, would be true for the very mechanisms by which the Jews of Kiev governed themselves; an early forbearance for a form of semi-independent Jewish self-governance in Kiev, one based on the government's vision of an acceptable form of Jewish leadership, gave way in the 1880s and 1890s to intolerance for any autonomy and a wholesale takeover of the Jewish communal governing body by the government. This takeover must be understood in light of the tsarist government's deep suspicion of all independent Jewish associations—indeed, of all civil society activity by any Russian subjects— and its long-term, though vague, strategy to place checks upon the activities and influence of Jewish organizations.
Little is known about this attempt by the Russian state to transform the leadership and structure of the Jewish community, which was actually part of a larger bid to reform Russian Jewry as a whole and "merge" Jews with the surrounding society. The story that is better known and more often told is Russia's attempt to make over its Jews through education by establishing, be-
Ginning in the 1840s, a network of state Jewish schools and seminaries that eventually produced a cadre of Russian-speaking Jewish intellectuals and professionals seeking to integrate into Russian society.1 This chapter will examine the emergence of Jewish communal governance in Kiev and explore the fraught relationship between the heads of the Jewish community and the Russian authorities. Examining the history of the official governing body of Kiev Jewry and two other central Jewish institutions in the city, the Crown rabbinate and the Choral Synagogue, we will see that the Jewish community was indeed transformed, though not quite in the fashion that the authorities had envisioned. The government's bid to concentrate communal authority in the Jewish elite and to vest it with official government authority failed because the widening gap between that elite and the masses it claimed to represent led to a crisis in authority. A similar, previously extant rift between the Jewish masses and the government also expanded, echoing the larger crisis in Russian society leading up to the 1905 Revolution. Democracy and public accountability—whether for the sake of the ideal of representation or in order to gain power for one's own faction—became the watchwords of the day in the Jewish community, as in the Russian society of which it was an integral part.
World History
