The Choral Synagogue

The Choral Synagogue in Kiev, or the Brodsky Synagogue as it was known, was not built until 1898, but those interested in gathering in a European-style house of worship met in rented premises until they were able to secure permission to erect their own building. Like the choral or great synagogues in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Odessa, the Brodsky Synagogue in Kiev did not deviate from Jewish religious law, but the changes it made in custom (minhag) were significant, especially for Eastern Europe where min-hag played a central role in Jewish religious culture. A hired cantor led the services, often with the help of a choir; the rabbi delivered sermons in Russian; the layout of the pews was changed (all seats now faced the eastern wall); and extraneous conversations were banned.129 Unlike in most Jewish prayer houses, great attention was paid to ensuring that the architecture and decor of the synagogue were both lavish and aesthetically pleasing. One newspaper account gives a hint that, as in Warsaw's Great Synagogue, men called up for honors to the Torah were required to wear black hats.130 We do not know whether, as in Odessa's Brodsky Synagogue, medieval piyyutim were eliminated from the service; this would have been a step further in the process of change.131 What is clear is that the synagogue did not go as far in its innovations as some of the more radical synagogues in the Odessa area, such as that of the Society of Jewish Shop attendants, which featured an organ and a mixed-sex choir on the High Holy Days.132

Details are sketchy, but there is evidence that there was a certain amount of struggle among the synagogue's members over the tone of the services. Friedmann wrote that Lazar’ Brodsky, like his father Israel, was a pious Jew whose philanthropy and public-mindedness were motivated by his wholly traditional desire to do good deeds.133 according to this account, Brodsky, who donated the lion's share of the funds for building the new synagogue, attempted to instill in it a traditionalist spirit, in apparent opposition to the other members of the board who were proponents of a more formal, decorous German-style Judaism. In Friedmann's heavily Zionist-influenced analysis, the latter eventually won out over the "living national spirit," and the synagogue became a "factory" for the recitation by so-called assimilators of the mourner's kaddish and dry ceremonies on Sabbath and festivals. It may be, then, that the physical trappings of a choral synagogue did not necessarily mean that the services themselves would be "modernized."

Apparently Lazar’'s less-prominent brother Lev was also traditionally minded. Several years after the opening of the Choral Synagogue, he endowed another synagogue immediately adjacent to the one his brother had founded. This new institution, which came to be called the Merchants' Synagogue, was evidently much closer in aura to a traditional prayer house, and may have been intended to be a very prominent answer to the Choral Synagogue. The worshiper would likely find things more disorderly here than next door.134 That the Merchants' Synagogue was apparently built as a traditionalist answer to the Choral Synagogue is at least one piece of evidence that the choral synagogues were a significant and momentous innovation in Jewish life that could be viewed both positively and negatively—as is also implied by the fact that in Odessa several synagogues (even an "Orthodox" prayer house) copied innovative elements of that city's Brodsky Synagogue, such as its choir and seating arrangement.135

It is difficult to know what most Kiev Jews thought of the Choral Synagogue and its proponents. Commenting on local religious life in 1885, Israel Darewski noted that most of the city's Jews were opposed to a choral or "reformed" synagogue in the city, since they were hasidim, followers of the tsad-dikim who resided in the area surrounding Kiev.136 The next year, Darewski commented acidly that the "enlightened" Jews of Kiev only attended synagogue three days a year, on the high holidays, and many were not even present for the New Year because they had not yet returned from their summer homes. A few more came back for the yizkor memorial services conducted on the Shemini Atseret holiday because, according to Darewski, "they have decided that yizkor is more important than prayer."137 A few years later, another correspondent remarked that he had heard many people speaking ill of the choral High Holiday services organized by the notables.138 At the same time, the grandiose building clearly piqued the curiosity of both Jews and non-Jews; after the gala dedication in 1898 (held on Lazar’ Brodsky's fiftieth birthday!), the doors were opened to the masses gathered outside so they could enter and marvel at the architecture and craftsmanship.139 The handsome exterior concealed a soaring sanctuary with fittings of the finest materials as well as a chapel, library, bridal chamber, meeting room, and a room for choir practice. The building was also centrally heated and ventilated using state-of-the-art technology.140

Many proponents of choral synagogues did not view them as the "deviations" that others saw, but as just the opposite: as tools to bring progressive, acculturated Jews back in touch with Judaism and the Jewish people. Writing in the Hebrew press in 1896, a defender of the soon-to-be-built choral synagogue in Kiev remarked that the early choral synagogues had been built by modernizing Russian Jews eager to distance themselves from the "backward" ways of traditional synagogues. The new Kiev synagogue, however, was a reversal of that trend as maskilim returned to their roots, building a synagogue "in order to come closer to the Jews."141

Clearly, though, to many Jews the innovations of the choral synagogues were departures from the norm, as were the new burial paraphernalia introduced by the Kiev hevra kadisha (burial society) soon after its 1892 "takeover" from traditionalists by members of the acculturated elite, a move that had the sanction of Crown Rabbi Tsukkerman.142 Here Kiev was following a trend begun two decades earlier in Odessa, which had subsequently spread to many cities in the south.143 The new options were meant to satisfy the modern tastes of the acculturated elite as well as the requirements of tradition: coffins with black writing on a white background, instead of plain wooden boxes; a hearse drawn by black horses; and special mourning garb for the undertakers. (Apparently not everyone would be entitled to such lavish treatment; some or all of these burial extras were dependent on "the honor of the deceased.") While one observer emphasized that the new caskets were not Christian catafalques, another claimed that the new coffins did, indeed, look like catafalques, and that they had been introduced for the precise purpose of preventing the enlightened and wealthy from buying coffins from non-Jews (such an incident had already occurred once).144 What remains unclear is whether this change was for the elite's own convenience, as it transformed the burial society in its own image, or if it was rather an attempt to incorporate certain modernizations into the society so that it would remain relevant to all Kiev Jews. The Jewish elite plainly had an interest in transforming in its own image the communal institutions it controlled, but one wonders if all Kiev Jews—the majority of whom were far from acculturated—approved of such changes. While the Choral Synagogue incorporated newfangled elements such as Russian preaching and a choir on days other than Sabbaths and festivals, it was meant for the exclusive use of the acculturated Jews. The burial society, by contrast, was a communal institution to which almost every Jew in Kiev would sooner or later have to turn.

On the occasion of the marriage of scions of the empire's most illustrious Jewish families, Lazar’ Brodsky's daughter Klara and Vladimir Gintsburg (son of Baron Horace, the St. Petersburg financier), Yitshak Ya’akov Vaysberg wrote that "Jews and non-Jews streamed in their masses to the synagogue" and waited for hours, presumably for a chance to glimpse the rich and famous dressed in their finest.145 The very fact that the choral synagogue

Could be a kind of tourist attraction for most poor and/or uneducated Kiev Jews, conspicuous in its difference from most other prayer houses in the city, underscored the disparity between the groups.

Despite his role in the establishment of the Merchants' Synagogue, Lev Brodsky's own religious inclinations were somewhat idiosyncratic, as with other Kiev Jews we have already discussed. Indeed, it may have been just those inconsistencies in his own religiosity that convinced him of the importance of a new traditionalist synagogue in Kiev and, in general, of "oldtime religion" as the foundation of Jewish life. Although Brodsky himself lived a life of libertinism, wrote Friedmann, he was concerned that the Jewish masses maintain their traditional religiosity and that their children be educated in hadarim, learning Bible, Talmud, the prayer book, and psalms. (Apparently, Brodsky's "libertinism" was part of family lore, as Alexandra Fanny Brodsky describes her ancestor as a "womanizer" in her memoir Smoke Signals.)146 When it came to communal funding for Jewish matters, he was interested only in Talmud Torahs, ritual baths, and kashruth.147 The secular, acculturated life that bourgeois Jews wanted for themselves, then, was deemed inappropriate for the masses. Clearly, they were anxious about the future of the "Jewishness" that they viewed as genuine, and saw it as their duty to preserve traditional Judaism. It is interesting that philanthropy here played a central role in the maintenance of Jewish identity: by sponsoring traditional schools for the poor, well-to-do Jews could ensure that the authentic piety that they themselves had abandoned would be sustained. The role of the poor, then, was just as important in this transaction as that of the benefactors, for they—or their children—were charged with "being Jewish" as proxies for all Jews.

Brodsky was not the only member of the Jewish elite—especially those prominent in the communal leadership—who was anxious about the growing secularization among the Jewish masses in the early years of the twentieth century. According to a writer in the short-lived Yiddish newspaper Kiever vort, the members of the schools commission of the official communal body, the Representation for Jewish Welfare, demanded that an archaic, old-fashioned heder-style curriculum of prayers and psalms be preserved in communal schools. Although these men were themselves irreligious and did not teach their own children Yiddish, complained "Pedagogue," they demanded piety from the Jewish poor and refused to be guided by the expertise of trained teachers. But the new generation of maskilim, activists in the Kiev branch of the OPE, the primary educational and cultural organization of the Russian Empire, were not much better, wrote "Pedagogue," despite their reputation for progressive thinking. Here, too, the bourgeoisie attempted to impose its vision of "authentic" yidishkayt (Jewishness) on the poor who attended the schools it controlled. For example, when contemporary pedagogy dictated that children learn the Bible in abridged form, these "bourgeois maskilim" cried heresy and demanded that traditional methods of Jewish education be adhered to. While educational theory called for children to be educated in their mother tongue, the OPE activists threatened to cut school subsidies if teachers did not rid the curriculum of Yiddish and teach the prayer book and psalms instead.148

As the example of the Brodsky brothers demonstrates, we cannot simply classify all wealthy merchants as acculturated and modernizing in their approach to religion; patterns of religious observance did not always break down according to the socioeconomic lines we might expect. According to Friedmann, most of the wealthy sugar merchants—including the wealthiest men, Lazar’ Brodsky and the Hasid lonna Zaitsev—were "Orthodox" Jews who were knowledgeable of Torah, attended synagogue, and participated in traditional Talmudic and midrashic study circles.149 (To confuse matters, this would not necessarily obviate taking on, to some extent, the trappings of imperial Russian society in dress and mannerisms: trimmed beards, European dress, and Russian speech.) Sholem Aleichem gives a fictional example of this kind of Kiev Jew in The Bloody Hoax in the form of Shlomo Familiant, a wealthy, "worldly merchant" who is at the same time a pious Hasid who disapproves of going without a hat, "a terrible sin."150 Some of these men were relatively unacculturated, wearing the traditional "long kaftan and large prayer shawl," like Familiant, who is reminiscent of Ionna (Yona) Zaitsev, one of Kiev's richest industrialists.151 Zaitsev was a Hasid who remained strictly observant his whole life and apparently refused to attend the Choral Synagogue, as evidenced by his 1904 request for permission for a private chapel in his mansion.152 Zaitsev's claim that he was too old to walk to prayer houses in the two heavily Jewish neighborhoods of Kiev reveals that he preferred to walk several miles to Sabbath worship over taking a much shorter stroll to the nearer Choral Synagogue, which had been open since 1898. Conversely, those whom we might view as the most opposed to acculturation were not necessarily so: the Hebrew press reported that members of the household of the Hasidic Rebbe Yohanan of Rotmistrovka were all literate in Russian. This lax attitude came back to haunt the rebbe, however, as—according to one report, at least—when his son came to Kiev, he began to read the newspapers every day and eventually "ran off to study secular wisdom."153

Even ordinary Jews were criticized for their lax ways. One observer lamented the immodest behavior that could be seen at some Jewish weddings, where men and women mingled and even danced together.154 Jews were also dressed down for improperly observing various religious fasts.155 One critic alleged that, while it used to be said that "from K[iev] comes forth Torah," these days it had left for good; though he hastened to add that it was difficult to generalize about Kiev, since the Jewish population there was so diverse, one learned and another ignorant.156 That the city's Jewish masses remained traditionally pious, at least in moments of crisis, is indicated by Sholem Aleichem's account of the reaction to the 1905 pogrom, when a fast day was decreed a month after the massacre. The Yiddish writer, visiting Kiev's prayer houses, witnessed large candles burning, Jews reciting the penitential prayers and the confession, beating their breasts, and singing Ha-noten teshu’a—the prayer for the monarch.157 A similar response had followed the pogrom of 1881, a quarter-century earlier. However, the fact that even nonobservant students often chose to join in such fasts as an act of solidarity is proof that many Jews who were lax in their ritual observance may have returned to traditional forms of piety at moments of despondency.

Apparently, criticism of Jewish observance or piety stopped at the doors of the commodities exchange; in Voltaire's words, "When it's a question of money, everybody is of the same religion." Truly, what mattered was not how one lived, but how much money one made. The brokers, speculators, and runners who gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Kiev Exchange were Jews of all types—young and old, rich and poor, some dressed in finery and others in rags, "skinny Lithuanians who knew Torah and. . . boorish, rude, strapping, ungainly Volhynians and Podolians." According to Friedmann, most were clean-shaven, irreligious types—not conscious heretics but simply "free from the yoke of the Torah"—but there were also observant Jews with peyes among them.158 In the hubbub of the exchange, these differences were insignificant; the pursuit of profit united them all. Sholem Aleichem's fictional Menakhem-Mendl wrote to his wife Sheyne-Sheyndl:

You should see Kreshchatik Square. It's mobbed with Jews. . . . The word from Petersburg is, buy Transports [stocks] for all you're worth! The whole world is holding them: Jews, housewives, doctors, teachers, servants, tradesmen—who doesn't have Transports? When two Jews meet, the first question is: "How are Transports today?"159

Friedmann's entertaining anecdotes reveal that the all-pervasive culture of money made its mark among the "pious" as well, and some nou-veaux riches apparently believed that their wealth had given them Jewish erudition too. One sugar trader came to Kiev from a Hasidic court in Vol-hyn, where he had been agabai (treasurer), selling entrance tickets to see the rebbe. After making his fortune in speculation and money-lending, he became a bigwig in one of the Kiev synagogues and, considering himself a great scholar, even wrote a work of Talmudic casuistry; another time he demanded to lead the prayer for rain in place of the cantor, though his voice was far from melodious.160