A Crown rabbi [kazennyi ravvin] was at first appointed for Kiev immediately after the city was opened to Jewish residence in 1861, but the Jewish merchants who had settled there protested that they wanted an elected rabbi, an educated man who would command respect. In the election that ensued, Evsei Tsukkerman, a new graduate of the state rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir, defeated one avraham Binshtok to become Kiev's Crown rabbi.121 Tsukkerman was indeed fortunate to obtain the position in Kiev. A young graduate of a state seminary—so different from most Jews in his European dress and secular customs—often spent years struggling to be more than a functionary recording vital records in the metrical books and writing reports, the responsibilities to which many communities attempted to limit the official rabbi.122 Many also received meager salaries apportioned to them by communities that preferred to save their funds to pay the salary of the "real" rabbi (the so-called spiritual rabbi [dukhovnyi ravvin]).123
Unlike many state rabbis at the time, Tsukkerman had received a traditional Jewish education and was reasonably well-versed in Jewish law and lore. Though many official rabbis were treated by their Jewish communities as little more than lower-level bureaucrats, those in the newer communities of the southern Pale often had some success in making a place for themselves as organizers of communal affairs, welfare, and charity, thus earning the trust of their communities—as Tsukkerman was to do quite effectively.124 Indeed, Kiev, a new community without the established traditions of most Jewish towns, was the ideal post for a new Crown rabbi.
Because Kiev's Jewish community governing board, at least in its first years, was a self-selected group of merchants and businessmen, men on the path of embourgeoisement and acculturation, it is no surprise that they requested the right to choose their own rabbi. Unlike most Russian Jews of the period, they saw in the Crown rabbi a religious official and, as such, someone who would be in the public eye and, perhaps more importantly, representing the community to the government. Judging from his three decades-plus term of service, Tsukkerman did his job well. He was reelected time and again, always by the same small circle of first-guild merchants, the only Jews with full privileges in Kiev. He served them well, delivering homilies and sermons at community events and dedications (in Russian, as correspondents to Jewish newspapers noted proudly).125 In the 1880s and 1890s, he was among the leaders of the drive to obtain permission for a Western European-style choral synagogue, which was clearly to be a house of worship for the more accultur-ated elite and bourgeoisie.126
Eventually, Tsukkerman himself was able to join the ranks of the elite he served: he was granted personal Honored Citizen status, which bestowed a number of valuable privileges on its bearer. In 1886, he even petitioned for this status to be made hereditary in recognition of his twenty-five years of service to the Kiev Jewish community. In a revealing evaluation of the worth of his own work as a Crown rabbi, he argued in his petition that had he been a merchant, he would have received hereditary Honored Citizen status after only twenty years—and were not his achievements at least as valuable as trade?127 His salary toward the end of his career, approximately 6,000 rubles per annum, was a great deal of money by any measure of the time.128 While slyly poking fun at the rabbi, in his memoir Sholem aleichem also conveyed his impression of Tsukkerman's striking stature and mien, which may also have served him well in securing and maintaining his position: "Compared to [all the crown rabbis of the smaller towns he had known], the Kiev crown rabbi was a magnate. Compared to him, they were monkeys, midgets. He was a giant. A good-looking man. His one flaw was that he had a sallow complexion and was phlegmatic. He spoke slowly, moved slowly, thought slowly. A man without fire."129
In the eyes of some, the money used to pay Tsukkerman's wages was well spent, for he was an advocate for the Jewish poor as well as the wealthy and middle class, and he was praised in the empire's Jewish newspapers for his dedication to the less fortunate. In the early 1870s, he intervened in the running of the city's Talmud Torah to insist that its pupils be properly fed during the school day; a correspondent to Kol mevaser from Kiev wrote, "Luckily, the Rabiner Tsukerman endeavored to ensure that some of the children would receive food from the communal soup kitchen [gorkekh].”130 As one report from Kiev related in the 1880s, "since his election, Rabbi Tsukkerman has initiated a number of important projects, and he is always looking out for the welfare of the poor."131 Another writer described him as "the spirit of all charitable enterprises here."132 Among the philanthropic projects he reportedly helped initiate were a society to provide artisan training for poor Jewish youths and a fund to provide financial aid to poor Jews attending Kiev's gymnasia.133 His influence with non-Jews was another boon to the community; for example, in an article he wrote for Kievlianin, he defended the legitimacy of oaths taken by Jews, putting to rest the doubts of many local judges who had read an earlier article about the supposed simple annulment of oaths offered by the Talmud.134 Tsukkerman was also active in local Hebrew culture and Palestinophile organizations such as the Judaica library, the Society of Lovers of Jewish Science and Literature, and the local branch of the Palestinophile Hibbat Zion (see chapter 4 for more on these organizations).135
Tsukkerman not only worked behind the scenes to initiate projects, but also held important leadership roles in the community's institutions. Thus, for example, Israel Darewski, a frequent correspondent from Kiev and an expert on local history, wrote that Tsukkerman was serving as the chairman of a select committee appointed to supervise the excise tax contract and its orderly execution and accounts, since the law gave responsibility over the korobka to the Crown rabbi.136 at various times he was also a member of the Jewish Hospital Committee (1875), the Pogrom aid Committee (1881), and boards of other institutions. Tsukkerman was also one of the overseers of the Talmud Torah in Kiev's heavily Jewish suburb Demievka.137
In 1892 Tsukkerman engineered a takeover of Kiev's burial society that was widely viewed as a triumph for the benefit of the community. according to Darewski, the society had been run by Jewish soldiers, dating back to the previous period of Jewish settlement in Kiev in the early nineteenth century. Burials were carried out crudely and without dignity, and the finances were totally hidden, but no one had dared to wrest control of the society from their hands until Tsukkerman stepped in, using his connections in high places to successfully request that a new burial society be authorized. The takeover clearly benefited the reigning Jewish plutocracy, for the new burial society was to be led by "the heads of the Jewish community of Kiev," twelve trustees to be chosen by the municipal administration, "great men of Torah and of wealth."138
The burial society episode was characteristic for its time. In the same period when new, independent relief societies began to crop up throughout the empire, a parallel trend toward centralization was also occurring. In some places, the new modern welfare association naturally coopted existing aid organizations (the traditional hevrot) by virtue of the education and resources— and therefore better access to funds and government assistance—of its more acculturated and often younger leaders. In cities and large towns, it was almost universally true that the new associations were led by the most influential members of the Jewish community, often those with secular education, wealth, and connections, or some combination of the three. Knowledge of the law and connections in high places also often meant easier access to korobka funds, no small asset in the cash-starved Jewish communities of the Russian Empire.139 and the modern associations, with their promise to alleviate the poverty of Russian Jews through the most up-to-date methods of relief, attracted the energies of young, acculturated Jews; such Jews had had no interest in participating in the old hevrot, which, in addition to their reputation for shady financial dealings and lack of transparency, lacked the social incentives offered by the modern obshchestvo.140
Kiev's situation, however, was somewhat different. Its main welfare institution was not organized along the lines of the new associations, but was a closed, unaccountable group without a membership. It did not seem interested in adopting the methods of "scientific charity" espoused by the new voluntary sector. Moreover, in the case of the takeover of the burial society, the abolition of the hevra and the transfer of its responsibilities to the new association were coerced. Such phenomena were not unique; in Khotin (in Bessarabia), for example, the municipal administration ordered that all the property of the old Jewish welfare organization be transferred to the new Jewish Relief Society.141 However, in Kiev, the "expert Jew" Aaron Tseitlin had, only a few months before the burial society takeover, been asked by the governor-general to compile a report on the history, necessity, and utility (or lack thereof) of the Jewish hevra kadisha and specifically Kiev's Jewish burial society; this may have signaled, as right-wing newspapers were warning, that the authorities were unhappy with the state of affairs in this sector of the Jewish community.142 In that case, Tsukkerman's actions, perhaps motivated by information he had obtained through his many well-placed contacts, may well have saved an important institution of Jewish Kiev from restriction (abolition was unlikely) by the authorities. From this perspective, the "coercion" appears rather different.
Some outspoken members of the community were probably not surprised at Tsukkerman's actions against an independent communal institution— and potential rival for leadership—on behalf of the powerful elite. Such critics saw a different side of him, and paid less attention to his activities in the charitable sphere than to his connections to the Jewish oligarchs and possible explanations of his incredibly lengthy tenure in the post—thirty-three years, one of the longest of any Crown rabbi. In the mid-1890s, allegations began to emerge that Tsukkerman was in the pocket of Kiev's Jewish elite, with Lazar’ Brodsky at its head, and that kosher excise funds paid by Kiev's poor Jews were being used to pay the salary of a rabbi who fought against the interests of those very Jews. It was argued that the Crown rabbi's long dependence upon certain wealthy members of the community had stripped him of his ideals.143
In 1896, a Kiev Jew by the name of Lev Shtammer wrote a letter to the local newspaper Kievskoe slovo, claiming that Tsukkerman, the Jewish plutocrats, and the authorities had colluded to limit the electorate and the candidate pool to make the rabbi practically "irremovable." Those who truly cared about the rabbinate did not have the right to vote in the Crown rabbinical elections.144 Shtammer may even have gone as far as to submit a petition to the local authorities on the matter. An internal memorandum of the Kiev municipal administration from 1896 maintained—apparently in response to a claim (from Shtammer?) that the most recent rabbinical elections had been illegitimate—that, despite the lack of participation by local artisans, the rabbinical elections of 1894 had "in no way been compromised."145 Archival records show that the circle of those eligible to participate in rabbinical elections was indeed small; in 1884, for example, invitations were sent to only 134 individuals out of a total Jewish population of at least 11,000.146 The very fact that the elections were announced by invitation or, at best, by the placement of a tiny notice in the local papers was, according to Shtammer, proof that a deliberate attempt was being made to ensure a specific outcome—that Tsukkerman would remain in the position of Crown rabbi. The wealthy Jews cared so little about the rabbinate—presumably because, since they had little need for religion, their only use for the rabbi was as a metrical records clerk— that only those who intended to vote for Tsukkerman actually showed up at the polling place. Further, argued Shtammer, the election was announced in such a way as to guarantee that no other applicants would have time to present their candidacies.
A pamphlet that Shtammer wrote a decade later was even harsher in its indictment of Tsukkerman and his patron Lazar’ Brodsky. Shtammer accused Brodsky of using his unlimited power in the community before each rabbinical election to ensure Tsukkerman's election—but only after the latter fawned upon him, "our Jewish protector [or champion, zashchitnik]," to guarantee his own success. Why was it that only the Jewish elite could vote in Kiev, when rabbinical elections were open to the entire Jewish community in all other locales? It was, claimed Shtammer, because Tsukkerman had craftily taken advantage of a previous case in a far-off provincial town, in which the circumstances were completely different, in order to argue that Kiev's Jewish artisans and clerks were actually "nonresidents." He had thus managed to disenfranchise all of Kiev's Jewish poor in one stroke.147
The plot thickened, continued Shtammer. Because of Tsukkerman's growing self-assurance in his position, he had neglected to pay proper obeisance to provincial authorities, who then initiated an inquiry into the legal status of Kiev's rabbinical elections. When the Ministry of Internal Affairs declared that all of Kiev's Jews, including artisans and clerks, were eligible to vote for Crown rabbi, Brodsky and Tsukkerman hastily pressed for legislation to avert a universal franchise: the Crown rabbi would now be chosen by electors, who would in turn be elected by members of Kiev's prayer houses. And, according to Shtammer, a subsequent petition that was granted by the authorities defined members as those paying over 10 rubles a year.148 That sum was high enough to exclude most of Kiev's Jews, working-class artisans and clerks, from eligibility, as a 1907 petition from poor parishioners of a Kiev prayer house demonstrates. As with rabbinical elections, elections for synagogue boards were limited to those paying at least 10 rubles a year, which the petitioners protested gave control over their prayer house to the wealthy.149
This was probably not the only case in which a Crown rabbi used questionable means to ensure his reelection, since all Crown rabbis had to face election every three years, meaning that if they wanted stable employment they had either to win the trust of the community or limit the electorate to those who trusted them. The general rule for election of a Crown rabbi was that he, along with the spiritual rabbi, had to be elected by all "synagogue pewholders."150 This eventually also became the rule for Kiev, and probably meant all those who paid above a certain amount in dues. But Tsukkerman was likely in a very different position from most, since his job was virtually guaranteed and he had only to please the wealthy. He was thus in a position to do some unpopular things, such as introducing reforms in worship—as in the case of the Choral Synagogue.
World History
