The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education by Jonathan B. Krasner

Author:Jonathan B. Krasner [Krasner, Jonathan B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, History, Reference, Organizations & Institutions, Essays
ISBN: 9781611682939
Google: 3_V2lcwyrFwC
Publisher: UPNE
Published: 2012-01-01T03:59:42+00:00

Modern Talmud Torahs such as the Central Jewish Institute used children’s services to teach prayers and synagogue choreography. Girls and boys sat separately but without a partition. Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.

Faced with a rebellion among the parent body, Benderly’s disciples at CJI were forced to steer a middle course. Prayer reading was granted a far more prominent place in Schoolman’s 1922 curriculum than it had in Berkson’s 1918 version. Most of the extra time devoted to the prayer book came at the expense of Modern Hebrew and Bible study, both taught Ivrit b’Ivrit. While Ivrit b’Ivrit was by no means abandoned by CJI, Schoolman showed a fair degree of flexibility in addressing parental concerns. Whereas in Berkson’s curriculum Bible and Modern Hebrew commanded between 50 and 70 percent of the teaching hours in the upper grades, Schoolman’s typically devoted between 40 and 50 percent of the curriculum to Hebrew and Bible study.55

It is significant to note the differences in the way each articulated his goals in relation to Hebrew study. Berkson extolled the “natural method” on pedagogical grounds, as superior to the translation method of foreign-language study. But he freely admitted that the adoption of Ivrit b’Ivrit was motivated by a commitment to facilitating “national regeneration.” Writing only months after the British government committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Berkson argued that the study of Modern Hebrew was of “supreme significance for the present and future of Jewish life.” He asserted that “[a]ll Israel must have its common language,” adding that “the complete forgetting of a distinctive tongue will undoubtedly mean complete obliteration of the Jewish group.” Schoolman, while no less enamored with Palestine and no less committed to the unity of Israel, appreciably pared down his expectations of CJI graduates, even those who completed the six-year program. Very few would become fluent Hebrew speakers, capable of conversing with their cousins in Palestine; for most the study of Hebrew would foster an “emotional attachment” to the Jewish people. Berkson listed Hebrew-language acquisition as the first of four curricular aims, while Schoolman omitted this objective, insisting instead that his curriculum was “not formulated primarily for producing erudite Hebraists or Talmudists.”56

Fortunately for the CJI leadership, by the late 1920s the debate over the curriculum appears to have been settled. Entering its second decade, CJI’S lay and professional leaders were becoming more comfortable with its institutional identity. Moreover, the growing number of second-generation parents no longer expected the Talmud Torah to replicate an eastern European khayder-style education. While only a subset were drawn in by the Talmud Torah’s ideological commitments, most were won over by CJI’S ability to infuse Jewish teaching and Jewish living with joy. Nevertheless, the CJI experiment was a harbinger of things to come. Over the next decades, the Benderly group’s educational agenda would continue to be reshaped in response to a constellation of challenges revolving around class, ideology, demography, and the solidification of denominationalism.

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