Hospitals, clinics, and sanatoria could treat the poor once they were sick, but the new scientific philanthropy was also concerned with preventing poverty. There were several initiatives in the pre-1905 years that aimed to assist in the "productivization" of Jews: assisting poor artisans and training needy Jewish children in useful crafts.57 Some Jewish artisans had the privilege of settling outside the Pale of Settlement, and it was felt that encouraging the next generation to enter a field other than trade could only serve its interests and those of Russian Jewry as a whole, as more Jews moved to the interior provinces and integrated into Russian society. There was particular concern with providing an education for orphans so that they would not become a burden to the community. In 1879, around the same time that he was involved with the planning of the expansion of the Jewish Hospital, Israel Brodsky donated 40,000 rubles for a Jewish trade school to be built in Kiev.58 It is no surprise, however, that the project did not receive official permission for over thirty years; the authorities were perpetually concerned with the possibility that Kiev would become a magnet for poor Jews, whether artisans or not, and sought to prevent an "influx" of Jews into the city. The reality that they could not seem to come to terms with was that that influx had started almost from the very moment of Kiev's opening to Jews, despite the restrictions on settlement.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that Jewish poverty in Kiev was not as dire as it might have been. In 1887, A. P. Subbotin claimed that on the whole, Jewish indigence in the southwest was worse than in the northwest, but noted that, thanks to residence restrictions, "Jewish poverty in Kiev is not striking." He expanded on this phenomenon by remarking that "the small number of poor Jews is not so noticeable compared with the relatively comfortable non-Jewish population and especially with the masses of poor Christians"—including the 100,000 pilgrims who arrived each year, many of whom stayed in Kiev and ended up begging. His conclusion was that Jews made up a smaller percentage of poor than in other cities, and were being effectively assisted by the large number of wealthy Jews.59 A decade later, the situation was now just the reverse: a U. S. government report compiled on the basis of statistics gathered in 1897 and 1898 maintained that "the economic condition of the Jews in the south of Russia is so much better than that of those in the northwest that only since the recent disturbances has the emigration fever touched the Jews of that region."60 The upshot was the same, however: though there were many poor Jews in Kiev, overall the city remained a desirable destination for Jews (and non-Jews as well).
Despite their inability to establish the trade school, it seems that Kiev's communal leaders did organize a training program in crafts for Jewish boys from indigent families (most were probably orphans). The project, according to one account initiated by Crown Rabbi Tsukkerman, was declared pioneering in its supervision of the youths after their assignation to master artisans, and in its instruction in Hebrew, Russian, and other academic subjects. As a model program, it would help eliminate the prevailing circumstances wherein boys were "sold off" to long, cruel apprenticeships.61 Thus, like the Jewish Hospital, the training program was planned as a model project that would help teach Russian Jews the proper way to care for the poor. It was also reported that the chair of the training commission, M. Rozenberg, took an active interest in the program, even visiting workshops to check on the progress of the apprentices.62 A decade after its founding, the initiative was still in existence, with nine orphans in apprenticeships.63
Nonetheless, by the 1890s the absence of any Jewish schools in Kiev had become a serious problem in light of the ever-increasing quotas in many state and private schools. A group of Kiev Jews requested permission for a Jewish school in 1891 and then again two years later; archival documents reveal that the schools were apparently intended for the children of artisans and soldiers. It is unclear if this school was intended to replace the Talmud Torah or was meant for children of Kiev's lower-middle-class Jews who were not willing to send their children to an institution meant for "the poor."64 In any case, the governor-general turned down the request on the grounds that these Jews did not have permanent residence rights in Kiev and that allowing the establishment of a school would only encourage more such Jews to come to the city. A lower-level bureaucrat writing a memorandum on the same question argued that once one such school was allowed, there would be no way to stop the inevitable establishment of many more Jewish schools. He noted that there were already enough schools in Kiev which Jews could attend.65 Indeed, many Kiev children studied in the city's numerous gymnasia (this was a means to obtain a residence permit for Kiev), and another educational cause that was taken up by Kiev's Jews was support of needy Jewish gymnasia students, a fund originally created through donations from maskilim who were graduates of institutions of higher education.66
But the centerpiece of Jewish educational efforts in Kiev was the Brodsky trade school. around the turn of the century, Lazar’ and Lev Brodsky decided to establish a Jewish boys' primary school with a vocational division. The brothers, who wished their school to be the best of its kind in the Russian Empire, traveled throughout Europe to visit vocational schools before sparing no expense in planning and erecting the academy in Kiev. after they purchased a plot, they constructed a building with state-of-the-art appurtenances; its total cost was more than 300,000 rubles, a truly princely sum. "They imported the grand scale" of those schools, wrote G. E. Gurevich about a decade later, creating a facility that looked "more like a palace than a school. . . a gymnasium for wealthy children or an institute for noble girls."67
Izrail’ Kel’berin, close associate of Lazar’ Brodsky and author of a booklet celebrating the school, expressed explicitly the Brodskys' aspiration that the school—like the Jewish Hospital—be the leading institution of its kind in the Russian Empire, not only among Jews but among all the realm's peoples: "The Kiev Jewish School possesses unique characteristics that cannot be found in any other educational institution in Russia." Moreover, the school would serve as a pedagogical center for the entire Russian southwest, making its "museum of educational media" (collection of visual aids for teaching) available free of charge to all educators in the Kiev Educational District, a five-province region. As with many other welfare and educational institutions in the Russian Empire at that time, the school was consciously modeled on similar institutions in the West; in his brochure, Kel’berin quoted John Locke and made reference to schools in Germany and the United States after which the Brodsky School had been patterned.68
The Brodsky School was not only to be a model educational institution, but was to produce graduates who would themselves be model Jewish citizens of the Russian Empire. According to Kel’berin, the moral aspect of the school's mission was as important as the educational: pupils were to be instilled with "a love of activity and labor, a sense of duty, the instincts of civic spirit, national consciousness, and the like." The Brodsky School would provide not only education (obrazovanie), but also vospitanie, moral edification and upbringing, similar to the German Bildung, with its overtones of transforming the pupil into a cultured and civilized individual. Kel’berin made it clear that both were crucial because of the background of the pupils, "mostly children of artisans, petty traders, and clerks of modest means, and sometimes of utterly penurious parents who have neither the resources nor the opportunity to give their children even the least tolerable vospitanie."69 The founders of the school plainly considered a working-class background to be deficient in culture, civility, and the civic virtues, as well as adequate discipline, as witnessed by Kel’berin's unequivocal statement that "the first and principal rule for the pupils in the new school is strict discipline." Also to be emphasized were cleanliness and tidiness, which would lead in turn to "moral tidiness" and a love for elegance—all of which, it was assumed, were not to be found in Jewish homes of modest or scant means. Music and physical education were additional curricular elements that would not normally be found in Jewish schools. Not only would the pupils imbibe these qualities during their lessons, but they would then, through their own examples of good behavior, exert a beneficial influence on their brothers and sisters at home.
The school, then, was not only a model institution that would provide Jewish boys with excellent training for a craft to enable them to make a living, but would also create a core of new working-class Russian Jews worthy of emulation by all their peers. Industrious, dutiful, patriotic, and nationally conscious, their cultured character and bearing would set a shining example. Its benefit for Russian Jewry as a whole could be seen in its aspirations for its graduates, who as certified artisans would not only be able to make a living but also to obtain residence rights outside the Pale of Settlement.70 This vision, constituting the final words in Kel’berin's brochure, was clearly at the center of the school project, and encapsulated the Brodskys' continuing belief in progress and gradual emancipation for Russia's Jews. This was the same notion that had been expressed four decades earlier, when residence rights for the Russian interior had been granted to some artisans (as well as merchants like the Brodskys) —that the opportunity for an "honest" livelihood (i. e., one unrelated to trade) and domicile among Russians would lead to acceptance of Russian Jews and their eventual integration into the Russian body politic. Lazar’ Brodsky's gift of a few thousand rubles to endow a scholarship at the traditionalist Volozhin Yeshiva, compared with the hundreds of thousands spent on the vocational school at about the same time, reveals how great the difference was between his enthusiasm for a "new" model of Jewish education and his continued but by no means generous support for old-style institutions.71
It is significant that the Brodskys, who had contributed many thousands of rubles for the construction of the school, then provided only half of the school's annual expenses; the other half was to come out of the kosher meat tax proceeds, specifically from the funds allocated for the education of orphans and the poor. This arrangement may well have been designed to ensure ongoing communal investment in the institution, but also had a symbolic impact: the school, with its particular goals and priorities, was not the Brodskys' alone but belonged to the entire Jewish community, and the political statements that it made were by implication agreed to by all of Kiev's Jews.72
Other Jewish philanthropic institutions also stressed the importance of moral education for the working classes. The Society of Summer Sanatorium Colonies for Children of the Indigent Jewish Population of Kiev, for example, stressed that its program focused on building up the health and strength of sickly youngsters as well as their education and "elevating their spiritual level."73
World History
