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Notes
* A preliminary version of this article was first presented as a paper at conference on “Reframing Jewish Day School Education Worldwide,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 27–29 June 2006.
1. Some studies of the impact of Jewish education on students include: articles by Resnick, Schiff, Gamoran and Reimer in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1992); and the studies referred to in notes 11 and 12, below. See also studies by the Project for Excellence in Jewish Education, Boston. A variety of programmes for the study of classic Jewish texts from a non‐religious perspective have flourished in recent years in Israel. The Meitar College of Judaism as Culture is one example.
2. The number of “Jews” in the FSU depends on how one defines a “Jew,” and on political and institutional agendas. There are at least four conceptions of Jews in the FSU: (1) Jews according to halacha, those of a Jewish mother who had a Jewish mother, etc. This category is assumed to be quite congruent with those who identify themselves as Jewish on post‐Soviet censuses. The most recent censuses in Russia cite 259,000 Jews; in Ukraine 103,700; and in Belarus about 27,800. In addition to these 390,000, there are perhaps 5,000 Jews in the Baltic states, and several thousand in the Central Asian republics and in Moldova.
2) Khok‐hashvutnye evreii, or Jews according to the Israeli Law of Return who need have only one Jewish grandparent to qualify for Jewish status for purposes of emigration to Israel (though not for the purpose of marriage or burial there); (3) self‐described Jews; (4) Jews who qualify for categories 1 and 2 above but do not choose to identify themselves as Jews. Note that in Russia and Ukraine people no longer have to identify themselves by nationality (ethnicity) on their internal “passports,” as they did in the Soviet era.
3. For details, see Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence.
4. On Jewish education in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, see Halevy, Jewish Schools under Czarism and Communism.
5. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 337.
6. On Soviet Jewish schools, see Weiner, The Politics of Education; Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union; Siilin‐Vinograd, “Batei hasefer haYehudim bivrit hamoetsot uskhkiatam,” 59–67; Mark, “Evreiskaya shkola v Sovetskom Soiuze.”
7. The last Jewish member of the Party Politburo, Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, managed to hang on until 1957. More typically, the last Jew in the Ukrainian Politburo was purged in 1958. The number of Jews in the upper echelons of the secret police fell from 37 to 10 between 1934 and 1941. Gitelman, “Ethnicity and Terror.” Details on the numbers of Jews in high and mid‐level positions can be found in Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, 235–41.
8. See Goldman, “Russian Jews in Business.”
9. Jitlovsky, “What Is Jewish Secular Culture?” 92, 93, 95.
10. Some say that the way to their hearts (young, unaffiliated Jews) is through artistic and cultural exchange: Jewish music, books, movies and art. But along with the explosion of Jewish arts come many questions. Jewish thinkers are asking whether the arts should be viewed as a gateway to further Jewish involvement or as “a valuable destination in and of themselves.” Tigay, “A Puzzlement,” 40. Some believe that the new Jewish literature produced by the generation after Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, and suffused with more explicitly Jewish content, is a new basis for non‐religious identity and constitutes a form of cultural Judaism. But no matter how large the Jewish reading public, this seems hardly likely to sustain Jewish commitment or activity, though it probably buttresses Jewish sentiments.
11. Steven M. Cohen and Laurence Kotler‐Berkowitz, “The Impact of Childhood Jewish Education on Adults’ Jewish Identity: Schooling, Israel Travel, Camping and Youth Groups,” Report 3 to the United Jewish Communities, July 2004, 14, 15.
12. See, for example, Alvin Schiff and Mareyleyn Schneider, “The Jewishness Quotient of Jewish Day School Graduates: Studying the Effect of Jewish Education on Adult Jewish Behavior,” David Azrieli Graduate Institute of Jewish Education and Administration, Yeshiva University, April 1994; Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, “Four up: The High School Years, 1995–1999,” Ratner Center for the Study of Conservative Judaism, 2000; Mordechai Rimor and Elihu Katz, “Jewish Involvement of the Baby Boom Generation,” Israel Institute for Applied Social Research, November 1993; Sylvia Barack Fishman and Alice Goldstein, “When They Grow up They Will Not Depart: Jewish Education and the Jewish Behavior of American Adults,” Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University and Jewish Educational Services of North America; Himmelfarb, The Impact of Religious Schooling. A bibliography of earlier studies of American Jewish education may be found in Brickman, The Jewish Community in America, 147–65. I wish to thank Dina Pittel, a senior at the University of Michigan, and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, for identifying some of these works.
13. Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War, 108, 111.
14. Gitelman et al., “Religion and Ethnicity,” 280–305.
15. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are members of the European Union and are involved with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), unlike other former Soviet republics.
16. Chabad and the officially recognized Lithuanian Jewish community have clashed to such an extent that, rather than allow one or the other to control the only synagogue in the capital, it has been closed for several years.
17. Avi Naiman and Lisa Beith Meisel, “Fulfilling our Promise, Fulfilling Their Promise: Helping the Jews of the FSU,” report to United Jewish Communities, National Young Leadership Cabinet, 2006. I thank Mr Naiman for providing the report.
18. Glanzer, “Postsoviet Moral Education in Russia’s State Schools,” 1.
19. Gitelman, “Former Soviet Union.”
20. David Rozenson, Miriam Warshaviak and Marvin Schick, “Avi Chai and Jewish Life in the Former Soviet Union,” report of May 2002, 9. The report was kindly made available to me by David Rozenson.
21. The schools in the Russian Federation are located in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kazan and Novosibirsk. The schools in Ukraine are in Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa. The Dubnov and Chabad schools of Riga are included, but the Vilnius and Tallinn schools are not.
22. The data were kindly supplied to me by David Rozenson of the Avi Chai Foundation in Moscow, 7 December 2005. I am grateful to Mr Rozenson for his willingness to share not only the data but his analysis of them. Of course, he is not responsible for my interpretations.
23. Tolts, “Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union,” 173, 180.
24. Ibid., 190–91.
25. Mark, “Chabad’s Global Warming.”
26. Rozenson et al., “Avi Chai and Jewish Life in the Former Soviet Union,” 13.
27. I am told that enrolments often rise slightly because of late arrivals.
28. For more details, see the appendices to this essay.
29. Rotman and Rokhlin, Sostoianie uchebno‐metodicheskogo kompleksa predmetov evreiskogo tsikla v obshcheobrazovatel’nykh shkolakh s etnokul’turnym evreiskim komponentom, 15.
30. Ibid., 16. These figures include schools that had been operating for less than five years. They were not included in the study of curricula.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 9.
33. Ibid., 12–13. For detailed, specific teacher evaluations of the materials available to them when teaching Hebrew, Jewish history and tradition, see Rotman and Rokhlin, Sostoianie uchebno‐metodicheskogo kompleksa predmetov evreiskogo tsikla v obshcheobrazovatel’nykh shkolakh s etnokul’turnym evreiskim komponentom, Chapter 4.
34. Ibid., 20.
35. Information obtained by Dina Pittel.
36. It is worth noting that four of five parents responding were mothers.
37. Vladimir Shapiro and Valery Chervyakov, “The Jewish School in Russia Today and Tomorrow, Part One,” a report submitted to the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 1999. I thank Professor Shapiro for making the report available to me.
38. Vladimir Shapiro, “Jews of St. Petersburg Today and Tomorrow,” final report submitted to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland; Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, Moscow–St Petersburg, 2004. Unfortunately, I have access only to the report and not to the data or the more than 120 tables provided in an index.
39. In the parallel girls’ school, there is a total of only 19.5 hours of Jewish studies, and, if the Avi Chai report is accurate, no written or oral Torah is studied.
40. Information supplied by the Avi Chai Foundation, to whom I once again express my gratitude.
41. Interview with Iryna Gubenko, 22 February 2006, Budapest. I thank Ms Gubenko for the interview.
42. Tables supplied by Avi Chai Foundation, Moscow.