RECENT WrItings

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MA Article

Jen Mabray

(Washington University in St. Louis)

Department of Jewish, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies

MA Program, Spring 2021

INTRO: The idea of education is not a choice, but a strict obligation, which the very survival of humanity depends upon, a positive commandment, crucial to human welfare and all are obligated: men and women, sons and daughters, each according to his worth and strength! Shalom Ya’akov Abramovitch (1835-1917)In 1875, a well-known journalist and essayist of Hebrew and Yiddish works, Shalom Ya’akov Abramovitch (Mendele Mokher Seforim), put forth his opinion regarding the advancement of girl’s Jewish education in a lengthy article, “Mah anu?” (Who Are We?).  

Abramovitch testified to the gloomy situation regarding poverty, superstition, and ignorance among the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, generally referring to Habsburg Galician Jewry (now present-day Ukraine).Nearly thirty years later, at the first and only Orthodox Rabbinical Conference in Kraków in 1903, Eliyahu Akiva Rabinowich, editor of Ha-Peles, erupted with vehement opposition to a proposal from his rabbinical colleagues, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Landau and Meir Horowitz, advocating Jewish education for girls: “Torah and commandments, of the life of the people of Israel and its faith.” Initially Landau’s solution was accepted, but he was silenced before he could voice the reasons he had already published prior to the conference: he attributed an upward trend in “immoral” behavior in Jewish daughters to the faulty education of the Galician state and unreliable, pernicious tutors. When his colleague Meir Horowitz stood to elaborate upon Landau’s proposal: “formal communal Talmud Torah for girls,” Rabinowich blew-up and retorted in anger, “A Talmud Torah for young women, God forbid! This shall not be.” The spark to ignite Jewish education for girls burned out moments later and for most rabbis was sent to the backburner where it came from.