by Israel Kipen
Meanwhile, organised Jewish life enjoyed full freedom of action and its activities proliferated unhindered under the authority of the central Council body. A multitude of communal organisations – social, cultural, medical, paramedical, financial, among others – were formed, not the least of these being political parties subserving a wide spectrum of ideological views. Political consciousness among Jews was scarcely a theoretical exercise. It arose from the very conditions of their existence. The industrial underpinning of Bialystok society led to an inevitable social stratification that brought equally unavoidable political cleavages in its train. On the one hand, there existed a well-to-do class of industrialists, merchants and professionals as well as a middle-class stratum consisting of shopkeepers, tradesmen, teachers and public servants. On the other, there was a very substantial Jewish proletariat who worked long hours in the mills or at their weaving looms at home, ekeing out a living as best they could, when work was available, by the labour of their hands.
Such social divisions, based on disparate income levels, prepared the leaven for social tensions, these in turn providing the basis for a diversity of both political expression and outlet. While these class divisions, ensuing social tensions and political expressions had their counterparts in the post-Industrial Revolution world at large, in the Jewish context, other factors also became entwined, the most salient of these being that of Jewish national aspiration. The two contrary ideologies that came to occupy central stage in Jewish existence between the wars were Zionism and Bundism. They contested each other both on the basis of real-politik relating to the conditions and the needs of the people extant at the time and, still more sharply, on philosophical grounds relating to the short-and long-term future, nature and direction of Jewish life in the Diaspora.
The respective points of view of the Zionists and Bundists were diametrically opposed on almost all aspects of Jewish life, whether in the interpretation of Jewish history, the place of Jewish religion and customs in daily life, the use of Hebrew or Yiddish, or in the political and social affiliations the Jews should form with those about them.
The Zionists, still at the beginning of the road in the years following the First World War, argued that the Jews as a people had no future in the basically anti-Semitic nations of central and Eastern Europe. Their aim was to extricate the Jews from being minority groupings in their countries of residence and reconstitute them as an independent and distinctively Jewish nation, with its own language, Hebrew, and its own political, economic, social and cultural forms. While theirs seemed essentially to be a negative response to the conditions of Jewish life in the dispersion, the more urgent thrust behind their philosophy was the wish to radically transform Jewish self-awareness, self-esteem and assertiveness. What lent strength to their appeals and arguments were the capitulation in 1917 of the Ottoman Empire which had held Palestine for the preceding four hundred years and the Balfour Declaration of the same year which recognised the historical right of the Jews to their ancient land (which was now under British jurisdiction) and which promised to facilitate the realisation of that right.
The Bundists, who came into existence as a political movement in 1897, the same year as the Zionist Organisation, represented the very antithesis of everything that Zionism stood for. The Bund was a Jewish workers’ party which based its tenets on elementary socialist principles and propounded a universalist social-democratic philosophy as this was understood in the nineteenth century. Its adherents held socialism to be the key to the attainment of the brotherhood of man and saw in it the sole solution to the unjust economic order that had throughout history governed society. With regard to themselves as Jews, the Bundists held that, rather than be transplanted to another territory, as the Zionists preached, they ought make common cause with the peoples about them in the creation of a just, tolerant and egalitarian society, even while fighting to secure their own civil rights in their country of residence. Instead of Hebrew, they championed Yiddish, to which end they fostered the establishment and development of Yiddish schools, Yiddish theatre and other such cultural activities as would raise Yiddish, till then the most prevalent language of daily discourse, to literary status. Above all, being a socialist party, the Bund organised the Jewish workers into Jewish unions, in this way forging a major electoral base within Jewish life more attuned to the immediate and tangible problems of the working masses and less concerned with longer-term remoter and even nebulous issues of national deliverance of the Jewish people as a whole.
In Bialystok, both streams found fertile ground for their flourishing. For the traditional Jews, in whom religion was not only ingrained but was also an integral part of national Jewish identity, Zionism held an emotive appeal. In other words, national and religious identity as Jews were as one, and it is significant that one of the earliest proponents and stalwarts of Zionism, the great and noted Rabbi Shmuel Mohliver, hailed from Bialystok. It was he who had travelled to Paris to discuss the implementation of the Zionist dream with Baron Rothschild, meeting with substantial success, while it was he who had been among the early pioneers of the Jewish National Fund. Another Bialystok Jew, an eccentric doctor, Joseph Chazanowich, conceived the idea of creating a Jewish national library in Palestine and himself collected some 63,000 books to that end. Though he died in 1919, his vision was in due time realised, the National Library attached to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem today bearing his name. By and large, Bialystok Jews were intellectually, emotionally and spiritually prepared to adopt Zionism as the fulfilment of the national dream as well as a means of personal redemption.
Zionism, it must be said, was not a monolithic ideology. It was a very plastic philosophy which concerned itself with one cardinal aim – that of national redemption through the restoration of an independent Jewish nation. It did not stipulate a priori the nature of that restored society, and therefore, as long as the basic tenet was accepted, it did not exclude anyone for reasons of being too far either to the left or to the right in political orientation. Hence, within the Zionist movement, there existed a wide range of political outlook and opinion.
On the right of the spectrum was the Revisionist grouping which advocated the conquest of Palestine by force of arms, promoted the idea of a capitalist-based economy and argued for a traditional Jewish way of life. Bialystok had a strong Revisionist contingent which included a well-organised Betar youth group.
More towards the centre sat the Orthodox-national Mizrachi movement which included the Hashomer Hadati youth group. Its main thrust was to render it incumbent upon every religious Jew to seek to live an authentic Jewish life in the land of the Bible. The striving towards fulfilment of that aim was, for its followers, an implicit religious command. The Mizrachi movement was also strongly represented in Bialystok and maintained there the very influential Tachkemoni schools, which I attended for a time.
In the centre of the Zionist spectrum was the General Zionist Organisation which, in orientation, sentiment, temperament and general outlook, represented the majority of Zionists. Its attitude was predominantly pragmatic and, as such, gave little room to strong doctrinal left- or right-tending leanings. While moderation and practicality could be a strength, they could also constitute a weakness, in that its platform was insufficiently specific to cater for those who held particularly strong views. In Bialystok, as elsewhere, it was both.
Left of the General Zionists was the labor party, Poalei Zion, which was the counterpart of the dominant party in Palestine. Its leanings were social-democratic, and in its early days included the more radical Marxist wing which later split off as Mapam. Poalei Zion had a considerable following among the working class. It fought ideological wars against the Bund. The youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, unlike its adult counterpart, was always radical in its socialism and had a large following.
Far left, and, as already indicated, non-Zionist at all, stood the Bund, and still further left, the Communist Party which was illegal. Its adherents, mainly passionate young Jewish i
dealists who looked forward to a new revolutionary order, not infrequently took part in public demonstrations and acts of defiance, thereby risking imprisonment. While many were, in time, to be sobered by the Stalin purges, which also demonstrated an unmistakable anti-Jewish bias culminating in the notorious Jewish Doctors’ trials of the ‘fifties, at the time of the Russian occupation of Bialystok in 1939, there were organised Jewish cells waiting for the arrival of the Soviet advance units whom they met in the centre of the city waving red flags.
While these represented the major ideological and political movements in Bialystok, there existed also other smaller groups occupying intermediate positions along the spectrum, as also more marginal ones not so readily accommodated by it.
One such group was the Aguda, which held to a staunchly ultra-religious orientation. In contradistinction to the Mizrachi, the other religious movement, but in common with the Bund, it believed in the continuation of the Jewish Diaspora. It fought Zionism on the grounds that a return to Zion could only follow the advent of the Messiah. Accordingly, any Zionist activity undertaken by men to secure national redemption represented a preempting of God’s Will and Purpose and had, therefore, on religious grounds, to be resisted. To the extent that the Bund was fundamentally anti-clerical, there could be no harmony between these two groups, even though Yiddish was another common denominator. Their differences did not, however, prevent them from concluding deals when such might prove politically expedient. Their numbers were moderate.
Also worthy of mention were the Territorialists who believed in the feasibility of creating an autonomous Jewish state outside of Palestine. One of the regions seriously considered for such settlement were the Kimberleys in north-west Australia. To this end, Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg, in the late ‘thirties and early ‘forties engaged in negotiations with the Australian government, but ultimately without success.
Modest as was the renown of Bialystok to the world at large, to Jews everywhere, it was a city most highly prized and esteemed. The reasons for this were manifold.
Geographically, it formed, with Vilna and Kovno, one of the points of the golden triangle of Lithuanian Jewry, famous for its learning and its cultural attainments. Here, “King’s Yiddish” was spoken, that is, a pure Yiddish, a literary Yiddish, uncontaminated by such dialects and alien linguistic inclusions as disfigured the language in the more central and southern parts of Poland.
Further, Lithuanian Jewry, so defining itself in order to be distinguished from Polish Jewry, had other characteristics which clearly demarcated it from its neighbour. Polish Jews, by and large, were Chassidic, they tended deliberately to highlight their differences from other Jews through their mode of dress, their mores, and their life philosophy, while the centre of gravity of their Jewish ethos was piety, and the underpinning web of their Chassidism was populism. In contrast, Lithuanian Jews were, in the main, non-Chassidic. They dressed more in keeping with the wider prevailing styles of the times. Their Jewish ethos centred on learning, while piety was held to be a private affair. In addition, they were, on the whole, more frugal, more even-tempered and less exhibitionist; they were more analytical than flamboyant – some would tend to describe them as “colder”. To them, too, was due the credit for having established the most renowned talmudic academies from whence came the largest number of rabbis to serve the Jewish communities of Europe and beyond, while, parallel with this, they had established major secular institutions as well, of equally world-wide repute to Jews. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research originated in Vilna and today operates from New York. Nahum Zemach, the father of the Habimah theatre came from the little township of Horodok near Bialystok, incidentally the birthplace also of my mother.
Even allowing for the more temperate disposition of Bialystok Jews against that of eastern European Jews at large, the internal battles fought out within Jewish life were charged with such intensity as bore witness to its inner vitality, dearly-held convictions and genuine, if at times naive, concerns.
The competition for the hearts and minds of the people benefited Jewry in keeping with the Talmudic saying that “the envy of writers proliferates wisdom”. Because all segments of the community were anxious to establish their bona fides in the socio-political arena, they competed with one another in establishing schools, cultural institutions, aid societies, medical and paramedical clinics, loan societies and a variety of other service organisations that came to form the common possession of Bialystok Jewry as a whole.
The focus of the education system at the time was upon primary school. The average child could not expect to continue its education beyond that stage. The government provided free primary education; there were only two government secondary schools in Bialystok, this being an almost exclusive preserve for the children of the Polish elite. By way of contrast, there were numerous Jewish primary schools as well as five Jewish secondary schools reaching to matriculation, and a well-endowed Jewish trades school, yeshivot and other institutions of learning.
As in the rest of the country, the widest network of Jewish schools was in the primary division. This incorporated the “cheder” – an old-fashion type unstructured school run by individual teacher-owners –, a chain of Yiddish schools, Tachkemoni schools, a well-established Tarbut Hebrew primary school and primary divisions of all the Gymnasia.
At the secondary level, in four out of the five Jewish schools, the language of instruction was Polish. Only in the fifth, the Hebrew Gymnasium, was Hebrew used as the general language of instruction; the only subjects taught in Polish being Polish language, Polish history and geography. All these secondary schools – the Hebrew Gymnasium, and the Druskin, Gutman, Zeligman and Spoleczna High Schools – were privately owned and run as business concerns. There were both clear and more subtle differences between them in terms of assimilationist tendencies, the amount of Hebrew taught, and the emphases given to other Jewish subjects. The numbers of students attending these high schools and their primary divisions ranged between 2000 and 2500.
There were yeshivot, too. Young people from the provinces studied Talmud here from one to four years in place of high school, sometimes entering these without completing a formal primary education. Many of them were poor and unable to feed themselves. Accordingly, it was customary to allocate yeshiva students to private homes to eat “days” – to be hosted to eat at different homes on a rotation basis. Our home also had one such student. The yeshivot were perennially in financial difficulties and issued constant appeals for support through the prayer-houses.
Synagogues and houses of prayer, known as “shtiblech” – literally “rooms”, sometimes located in a tenement house – abounded. Their names and origins can make a fascinating study in its own right. Some names, like the butcher’s synagogue – “Der Katzowiczer Beis Hamedrosh” – or the shoemaker’s prayer-house are piquant and instructive, often revealing something of the stratification of that ambient society. The vicinity around the central, or Great, synagogue, a magnificent edifice which was to be burnt down by the Nazis with some 1500 Jews inside, had a high concentration of prayer-houses. This area was aptly known as “Shul-hoif”, or “Synagogue Square”.
All synagogues were Orthodox, but they ranged in degree in their strength of Orthodoxy. As in the case of Zionist ideologies, in religious observance, too, the synagogues traversed a spectrum from right to left.
Towards the extreme right were located a number of Chassidic prayer-houses. These were made up of different tributaries emanating from the mainstream Chassidic movement that had earlier, from the eighteenth century on, arisen and spread through central and southern Poland. Hence, there were Gerer, Kotzker, Karliner and other Chassidim, each group extending special allegiance to its own spiritual leader, the Rebbe. Their presence in Bialystok in their traditional long black coats and distinctive caps and hats added a sense of colour and the exotic to the streets, particularly when a number would arrive from Galicia to purchase textiles. They would appear in white socks, silk caftan
s and shtreimels, wide-brimmed fur-rimmed hats, causing us to reflect on how relatively modest were our own Bialystok variety by comparison. The dream of every chassid was to pay a visit to his Rebbe and obtain from him a personal blessing. Such pilgrimages for those who could afford it served as sources of spiritual renewal and heightened self-esteem. Bialystok, too, possessed a home-grown Rebbe who lived in his prayer-house midway between the Takhemoni school and Druskin’s Gymnasium, there being a touch of irony in this, given the assimilationist bent of the Druskin school.
Towards the left of the synagogal spectrum were Bialystok’s two major synagogues: the Great, referred to above, and the Choral Synagogue, seemingly inappropriately situated in a narrow street amongst the city’s butchers, nonetheless a highly visible landmark in the midst of the multiform and multitudinous shtiblech. These two synagogues served the wealthier Jews of Bialystok. They employed top-quality cantors; their choirs, all male, were first-rate; their Presidents wore cut-away coats and top-hats, imitative of wider West European formality and manners; while the emphasis in each was less the degree of religious observance than formal association with the congregation.
In contrast to the practice in the new world where any congregation worthy of the name considers the installation of a rabbi as its spiritual leader a matter of prime importance, this was not the case in pre-War Eastern Europe. There were relatively few rabbis in Bialystok directly serving congregational enclaves. Those who did hold such positions, in tandem with the Dayanim —judges who sat on the Beth Din, or rabbinical court – were more involved with the religious duties of the courts they served, such as the supervision of dietary laws, than with the day-to-day running of the affairs of their synagogue. The reason for their relative paucity is clear. The more religious – Chassidic – congregations did not need a rabbi either to lead them or urge them in prayer; the people came most readily of their own accord. Further, the congregants themselves were in most instances sufficiently versed in the Law to handle alone any problematic issues that may have arisen. And as for the regular lessons, or shiurim, engaged in the learning of Talmud, these were often conducted by laymen, many of whom were scholarly and most capable of conducting such classes. The role of the rabbi, then, in some of the larger synagogues which could afford to employ them, was as much decorative as it was spiritual.
