At the same time that the Kiev OPE was being taken over by democrats, important changes were taking place in Kiev's Jewish communal governing body, leading to the first-ever elections for the members of the Representation for Jewish Welfare, in November 1906. As no original records of the body have survived, what exactly prompted the introduction of an elected board is unknown, but it is clear that the revolution and its accompanying upheaval had brought the years of criticism of the board to a head and made the further existence of an appointed body an impossibility. As the new board's secretary wrote in 1910, "the current board took shape immediately after 1905 and was permeated with the spirit of that year."123 (Of course the final decision was up to the municipal authorities, and probably the governor-general and the minister of internal affairs as well.)
Until 1906, the board had had nine members; now, twenty-four members were elected by about one hundred electors from Kiev's synagogues and Jewish communal institutions.124 According to secretary G. E. Gurevich, the elections, organization, and transparency (otchetnost’) of the Representation were to a certain degree considered models among Russian Jewry, and were even the subject of discussion at the 1909 Kovno conference on Jewish communal affairs.125 The elections, as with those for the State Duma, were characterized by open campaigns among various parties and groups, many of them calling for fundamental changes in the culture of Jewish welfare in Kiev: allocation of communal resources not by "the whim of large contributors or their stooges" but according to communal needs; attentive oversight of finances; and the democratization of communal affairs, including greater civility, openness, and equity.126
While the representatives had previously been drawn from the merchant estate alone, professionals and artisans were now included as well.127 According to guild and professional listings in the municipal almanac of 1907, five of the twenty-four were merchants, and another six were members of the free professions (doctors, lawyers, and an engineer); thus, it does seem that a majority of the newly elected representatives hailed from a socioeconomically diverse background.128 (Only two of them, Zaks and Gol’denberg, had sat on the Representation in 18 9 5.)129 The influence of 1905 is clear from Gurevich's statement that "attracting artisans to participate in the Representation became logical and right from the moment representatives of the urban workers and peasants began to participate in the governing of the Russian Empire." Many probably shared his opinion that what was good for the Russian Empire was good for its Jewish communities as well. (Note, however, that he made no claim that the Jewish community either was or should have been more democratic or inclusive before 1905 than the surrounding society had been.) However, there were apparently only two artisans on the Representation, making up 8 percent of all members in a city where artisans formed a sizable proportion of the Jewish population.130 This phenomenon can only be explained if two (and only two) seats were reserved for artisans; that is, representation was not proportional.
That a new era had arrived seemed evident from the new Representation's first achievement, one that had long been desired: a reduction in, and eventual elimination of, the subsidy for the Kiev police force that had been appropriated from the kosher meat tax.131 According to Gurevich, important reforms were implemented in the institution's procedures to do away with all corruption: previously, relatives and friends of representatives had been shown favoritism in the awarding of contracts, but now the bids process was conducted according to strict standards. These changes actually brought down costs associated with providing for the poor.132 The Representation members instituted regulations for all procedures throughout the organization—including, most importantly, in its accounting—and began to issue reports and hired a director for the main office.
The representatives used their first two years in office to study and expand the Representation's various branches of activity. Results were noticeable immediately; Gurevich noted that the Representation responded "more or less sensitively" to the needs of the Jewish community, and to emergencies that arose such as floods, epidemics, and mass expulsions. Not only was assistance provided, but commissions were created and legal aid made available—signs of a more scientific approach to philanthropy. The result, wrote Gurevich, was an upswing in public trust in the Representation and a consequent increase in income, both from general collections and individual contributors.133 This point is crucial: before 1905, the representatives had simply relied on the kosher tax revenues in additional to the contributions of individual plutocrats, as they saw fit. Now, the body had to earn and keep the public trust—not least because contributions, and thus the Representation's financial health, now depended on it. The new Representation also augmented communal assets when one of the members volunteered to take on the lease for the kosher meat excise at a substantially higher price than before, increasing the proceeds by almost one-third (from 144,000 to 187,000 rubles a year).134 Funds available for support of Kiev's communal institutions grew by over one-quarter in only two years, so that by 1908 that sum had reached 260,000 rubles.135
Observers from the outside, however, were not as enthusiastic about the results of the reforms and complained that, in effect, little had changed since the old days of the appointed Representation. In 1908, L. Dynin (a member of the OPE's Adult Education Commission) wrote to the Russian Jewish newspaper Razsvet that the Representation's response to a recent flood in Podol had left much to be desired: the hundreds of Jewish victims who had taken refuge in the Contract House, a large municipal building, were not being provided with enough food. According to Dynin, the Representation had not initiated the systematic response that was required: registering the number of victims, estimating their losses, and finding appropriate shelter for them.136
L. Efimov, another correspondent to Razsvet, was stronger in his critique, censuring the new Representation not only for "inconsistency and carelessness" but also "indifference and negligence," terms reminiscent of pre-1905 criticisms. Promises to study important issues went unfulfilled, educational institutions continued to be underfunded, and large portions of the budget were still spent on salaries of corrupt functionaries—prompted by the fancy of one or another wealthy bigwig.137 A Jewish communal leader from Warsaw visited Kiev in 1908 or 1909 and commented that while the generosity of Kiev's Jews was admirable, the funds were not being put to the best use; Warsaw's Jewish institutions were run much more cheaply.138
Both internal and external critics agreed that certain areas were in need of improvement, most notably organization-client relations. The Representation's main offices remained understaffed even after the reorganization, and applicants for aid traveled long distances only to be turned away or told that they would have to come again several days in a row. Dynin claimed that the office staff treated applicants coldly and that the aid commission met so infrequently that the demoralized recipients often had to wait months to receive their 5 or 10 rubles; Gurevich maintained that a more educated and accountable staff was what was needed. Both agreed that the attempt that had been made to assign Representation members to office duty for several hours per week had been a failure, since only a few members had shown up at all, and even then they came late or stayed for only a short while.139 At the 1908 general meeting, some complained that applicants often found the office totally empty! Gurevich claimed that the primary problem was that the Representation members expected too much of the office staff and did not fully carry out their own responsibilities—exhibiting the same lack of energy as before. Apparently, district guardians from among the Representation members had been assigned to evaluate applications in individual neighborhoods, but had never actually made themselves available for the task.140 Representation and individual commission reports—nonexistent before 1905—were now being issued late because members refused take responsibility for preparing them, and dumped them on the office staff.141 Critic Efimov charged that, as ever, thousands of rubles were being wasted on the salaries of rabbis and kashruth supervisors, some of whom were collecting wages for doing absolutely nothing or even selling their positions to the highest bidder.142
A primary complaint against the Representation, as in the pre-1905 period, was the favored treatment that certain institutions continued to receive. In 1907, subsidies for most institutions were cut while grants to the Jewish Hospital and the Brodsky State Jewish School were untouched or even increased; the Jewish Hospital continued to receive about one-third of all allocations.143 Fourteen community schools received 4,260 rubles, 10 percent of their annual budget, while the Brodsky School alone was allocated 6,000 rubles—almost a third of its budget.144 Critics complained that the community schools were poorly run and in terrible condition.145 Gurevich agreed that the plutocrats continued to insist on special benefits for their favored institutions, such as the Jewish Hospital and the Zaitsev Clinic, and to shield them from the oversight of the Representation, which provided the lion's share of their funding (or at least for the Hospital—60 percent), though in their capacity as Representation members, they hypocritically agreed to the importance of Representation supervision of all subsidized institutions.146 The hospital continued to ask for ever more money from the Representation while spending more than double per patient what other hospitals spent.147
Gurevich came out forcefully against the self-serving attitude of these wealthy Representation members, claiming that the new system of accountability was not something to which they could easily adapt: "They do not like either collegial discussions and decisions of issues, or being subject publicly and openly to public opinion." In sum, Gurevich maintained, the wealthy Representation members treated communal affairs as "a kind of game" that they never considered serious enough to warrant investing a great deal of their time in a thorough manner. Representation members from the middle class and the intelligentsia, who could be relied upon for greater equanimity and even-handedness, were too busy with their own affairs to give adequate time to the problems of the Representation.148 At the same time, they raised no objections to the city's long-established practice of taking thousands of rubles from the kosher tax revenues for itself; even as poor Jews were forced to give their hard-earned rubles to the city, which gave them nothing in return, the wealthy Jews spent huge sums on non-Jewish philanthropic causes to aid Kiev's Christian population. "Where is your energy, where is your dedication to the interests of the Jewish population?" asked Gurevich of the Jewish elite, echoing the critic of the Representation in Khronika Voskhoda almost a decade earlier.149 The middle class had no time for communal affairs, it seemed, while the haute bourgeoisie lacked both competence and patience.
Another example of a wealthy leader objecting to encroachment upon his territory as part of the reforms was that of M. R. Zaks, a prominent industrialist and one of the longest-serving Jewish communal leaders in Kiev. Zaks had headed the burial commission until the Representation voted to liquidate the commission's independent finances and merge them with the general finances of the Representation. According to Gurevich, Zaks considered this move "a personal insult," resigning his chairmanship and all further participation in Representation affairs.150 As this particular incident demonstrated, reforms could be implemented institutionally, but it was another matter altogether to change the venerable practices and ingrained habits of communal leadership. Moreover, the election of middle - and working-class members could not bring significant change to the Representation if the only members who had sufficient time to devote to communal responsibilities remained the wealthy.
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