The Yiddish Experiment in Soviet Minsk

This article was downloaded by: [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] On: 13 November 2012, At: 11:33 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK East European Jewish Affairs Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feej20 THE YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK Elissa Bemporad Version of record first published: 06 Jan 2011. To cite this article: Elissa Bemporad (2007): THE YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK, East European Jewish Affairs, 37:1, 91-107 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501670701302777 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.  East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 1, April 2007 THE YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK Elissa Bemporad East 10.1080/13501670701302777 FEEJ_A_230181.sgm 1350-1674 Original Taylor 102007 37 April [email protected] Bemporad Elissa 00000 European 2007 and &Article Francis (print)/1743-971X Francis Jewish LtdAffairs (online) Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 In mid-1924, the Central Executive Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party resolved to create a number of so-called “Jewish national centres” on the territory of the newly established Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. According to the resolution, national centres would be created wherever a large demographic concentration of Jews lived. In explaining what the national centres were and how they should function, the secre- tary of the Jewish Section of the Belorussian Communist Party (Evsektsiia), Yankl Levin, stated that administrative offices would operate in Yiddish and announcements and regula- tions addressed to the local population would be drafted in Yiddish. In short, the bulk of the official Soviet bureaucratic work would be carried out in Yiddish. Levin also admitted, though, the experimental nature of the Yiddish project and added, “This is something new … we will have to learn from experience.”1 His remark reveals not only the challenge that Soviet Jewish agencies and activists faced in their attempt to create an administrative system that could operate in Yiddish. It also reveals the absolute novelty of introducing Yiddish to the sphere of state bureaucracy, and, in general, of using it as the primary linguis- tic channel through which Soviet nationality policy would be implemented on the Jewish street. This article traces the main stages of the Yiddish experiment, or the campaign to promote the use of Yiddish in the 1920s and early 1930s, in the spheres of bureaucracy, culture and everyday life of one city: Minsk. An important Jewish demographic, religious and political centre before 1917, after the Bolshevik revolution Minsk became the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and its prominence in Soviet Jewish life grew accord- ingly. The new public spheres in which Yiddish made its appearance will be considered in the context of the Belorussianization campaign on the one hand, and compared with the “patrician” status of Russian on the other. As this study will show, the idiosyncratic commit- ment to Yiddish cultural, educational and scholarly enterprises on the part of the Belorussian Republic, combined with the widespread Jewish support for Yiddish in Minsk which pre- dated Soviet nationality policy, made the Yiddish experiment in this quintessential Jewish city more successful than in any other major urban centre in the Soviet Union.2 While Yiddish in the Soviet context has been the subject of several outstanding studies (by Zvi Gitelman, Mordechai Altshuler, Mikhail Krutikov, Gennady Estraikh, Jeffrey Veidlinger and David Shneer), my work differs from them in two main respects.3 First, it focuses prima- rily on the social context of the Soviet Yiddish experiment, without limiting the investigation to the Yiddish political and literary intelligentsia. Second, it examines the Yiddish experiment through a micro-approach and not a pan-Soviet focus. As Carlo Ginzburg has noted in his ISSN 1350-1674 print/1743-971X online/07/010091-17 © 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13501670701302777  92 ELISSA BEMPORAD discussion of the intricate relationship between micro- and macro-histories, “a close-up look allows us to grasp what eludes us from the overall view.”4 Korenizatsiia in the Belorussian Context Following the June decree of 1919, when the Bolsheviks selected Yiddish, and not the “clerical” Hebrew, or the “bourgeois” Russian, as the official language of instruction for all Soviet Jewish schools, Yiddish became the preferred instrument of propaganda to reach the adult Jewish masses as well, and the ideal language of political, cultural and scholarly Soviet Jewish enterprises.5 This preference had two main components. On the one hand, the process of Sovietization of society and politicization of everyday life and culture fostered a Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 functional retrieval of Yiddish, which became crucial in spreading Soviet propaganda and Marxist ideology among the Jewish masses who had little or no knowledge of Russian. On the other hand, because it was the native language of most Jews living in the Soviet Union, Yiddish came to represent the primary category for determining the existence of a Jewish narodnost’, or nationality, in the USSR. The nation-building process of the Soviet Union involved reshaping the former Russian Empire into a socialist federation of nationalities, and transforming the peoples of Tsarist Russia into modern citizens of the newly created Bolshe- vik society. Whereas the category of religion had been de-legitimized as a determinant of nationality for all of the Union’s peoples, the category of territory, or residence in a particular republic or oblast, was hardly applicable to the Jews because of their lack of a major territo- rial concentration. The shift towards the twofold function of Yiddish—as an instrument to accomplish the Sovietization of the Jewish street, and as a defining category of Jewish national identity—resulted in Yiddish assuming a new status in the political, cultural and scholarly life of the Jews. In Belorussia, in particular, this preference for Yiddish was officially mandated and enshrined in law. Only here did Yiddish enjoy the official status of a state language, some- thing it did not enjoy in other historic Jewish centres, such as Odessa and Kiev, or other large cities with major concentrations of Jews, such as Moscow and Leningrad. Together with Belorussian, Polish and Russian, Yiddish was one of the four official state languages of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR); these were the languages of the four main national groups of Belorussia which had historically inhabited the region. On 1 August 1920, the Declaration of Independence of the Belorussian republic proclaimed “The full legal equality of the languages (Belorussian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish) in relations with govern- ment agencies and in organizations and institutions of public education and socialist culture.”6 Every citizen, whatever his/her nationality, was guaranteed “the right and the actual possibility of using his mother tongue in dealing with any kind of organ and institution of the Republic;” every nationality was to have schools of its own and every public agency or organization was required to have the “necessary number” of Yiddish- and Polish-speaking employees.7 In the urban centres of Belorussia, local authorities supported the use of Yiddish in courts of law, cultural institutions and official party meetings also in order to thwart the Jews from using Russian, and prevent them from becoming agents of Russification—a role that a large segment of the Jewish intelligentsia had played since the time of Alexander II. During the second half of the 19th century, in fact, Russian administrators committed to the Russification programme in the northwestern provinces of the empire turned to the Jewish intelligentsia as a potential buffer against the rise of non-Russian nationalism, knowing that  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 93 many Jewish intelligenty tended to prefer the high status of Russian, to Polish, Ukrainian and Belorussian.8 By gathering support for minority languages, local leaders hoped to encourage the use of Belorussian among Belorussians. A thriving separate Jewish culture in Yiddish was thus in the interest of the promoters of the so-called korenizatsiia (indigenization) policy, a campaign to favour the use of Belorussian and Ukrainian (over Russian) in the political agen- cies and cultural institutions of the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics. The campaign to neutralize the authority of Russian and gain the support of non-Russian national minorities was launched in the first half of the 1920s, and was known as Belorusizatsiia, or Belorussianization, in Belorussia, and Ukrainizatsiia, or Ukrainianization, in Ukraine.9 Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 The commitment of local authorities to Yiddish was even stronger in Minsk than in Kharkov or Kiev, where the Ukrainianization process was generally less inclined to support the cultures of national minorities. Unlike Ukrainian nationalism, which was relatively well estab- lished and rooted before the birth of the USSR, Belorussian nationalism was, in many ways, the outcome of the Soviet experiment on the territories that in 1920 came to be known as the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.10 The awareness of concepts such as “Belorussia,” “Belorussian language” and “Belorussian history”—the notion of a shared Belorussian past, language and culture—remained uncommon and tenuous, in the cities in particular, until the establishment of the Soviet Union and thereafter. Before the Revolution, Ukrainian national- ism, which emerged as a political and cultural movement during the 19th century, could count on a fairly strong social-democratic organization, on a movement to modernize the Ukrainian language and on a futurist and symbolist literary tradition in Ukrainian. On the other hand, not only was a Belorussian version of European modernism missing, but within the family of Eastern European nationalities, the Belorussian Social-Democratic Party was one of the last ones to be founded, in 1903.11 In examining the formation of the Belorussian republic, historian Francine Hirsch writes that, “From the start, the creation of the Belorussian republic was an example of nation-making ‘from above’: not only did the so-called ‘Belorussian people’ react with indifference or opposition to the establishment of the republic, but some party members expressed concern that the party was ‘artificially cultivating’ a Belorussian nation- ality which otherwise did not exist.”12 A 1921 appeal to ethnic Belorussians by the head of the Central Executive Committee of the BSSR, I. Adamovich, and the deputy of the People’s Commissariat for Education, Ester Frumkina, captures well the attempt to form a Belorussian national identity among an intel- ligentsia that lacked one. It addressed “scholars, literati, pedagogical, pre-school, and … cultural activists, who were natives of Belorussia,” asking them to return to Belorussia, and contribute to the creation of a new Soviet culture in Belorussian. While the appeal acknowl- edged that “the work conditions in the Belorussian language are especially difficult,” it tried to hearten Belorussian cultural activists by pointing out that “You should not be embar- rassed if you do not know well enough the Belorussian language. Here … you will remember the language of your childhood and you will study it.”13 Yiddish in Soviet Urban Public Life The Jewish version of the korenizatsiia campaign to promote the use of Yiddish, which entailed government support for institutions and agencies operating in Yiddish, brought Yiddish to the public life of the city. The language was displayed in public spaces in Minsk  94 ELISSA BEMPORAD and for the first time became more visible in the everyday life of the city. On the building of the Central Train Station of Minsk, the name of the city appeared not only in Belorussian, Russian and Polish, but in Yiddish as well. Passengers who travelled to the city and saw the Hebrew letters on the building were reminded of the official status of the language and the Jewishness of Minsk. In 1926, upon arriving in Minsk, the Warsaw-based Yiddish writer I. J. Singer noted with surprise that “These four languages, Belorussian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish, meet me at the train station. They look down at me from the grey wall … I come across them at every step, in every commissariat, office, everywhere there are signs in the four languages.” The fact that Yiddish appeared in public spaces on the streets of the city, continued the writer, “is now something normal. The only one who marvels at this is proba- bly me.”14 Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 A number of important institutions in the city, such as Belorussian State University, displayed their official name on their building in Belorussian and Yiddish. The language was heard on Belorussian state radio and was seen in the movie theatres of the city, in the subti- tles to the movies.15 During local elections, electoral notices were distributed in Yiddish.16 The City’s Executive Committee of the Communist Party received written correspondence in Yiddish17 and applications for party membership or candidacy were submitted to local party committees in Yiddish.18 On 7 May 1924, the administration of the Central Post and Telegraphic Office of Minsk addressed the district and city party committees with a notice that was published in the local press a few days later. The postal service was looking to employ clerks who were able to read, speak and write in the local languages. The notice explained with meticulous detail the system through which the mail that reached the post office was to be delivered to the recip- ient of a parcel or letter. Letters written in a local language, such as Polish or Belorussian, were usually addressed on the left side of the envelope, while the right side of the envelope was typically left blank by the sender; this allowed the clerk to translate the address into Russian on the right side of the envelope. The job guidelines included a specific feature related to Yiddish. Because addresses written in Yiddish usually took up the whole surface of the envelope starting from the right side and moving leftward, and no blank space was left for the translation, the clerk was instructed to translate the address on the other side of the envelope.19 As these instructions to prospective post-office clerks illustrate, the language’s constitutional equality not only introduced Yiddish to the pettiness of Soviet bureaucracy. It also incorporated the language into the everyday life of the city and surrounding region, perhaps making this the only area in Eastern Europe throughout which letters could be addressed in Yiddish. Belorussian and Yiddish By all accounts, Yidishizatsiia was the Jewish analogue to Belorusizatsiia. Both low- status vernaculars became official. Previously disparaged for not being literary languages, Yiddish and Belorussian were suddenly transformed into languages of politics and culture. As historians Zvi Gitelman and Mordehai Altshuler have noted in their work on the Evsektsiia, the campaign for the promotion of Belorussian in administrative and political agencies of the country spurred an analogous campaign for Yiddish in those spheres.20 But there was another factor that guaranteed a special status for Yiddish in Minsk besides the Belorussian Constitution. It was the lack of popular support for the Belorussianization campaign itself and the low prestige that the Belorussian language enjoyed among city-dwellers, Jews and  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 95 non-Jews alike, especially when compared with the Ukrainianization campaign and the rela- tively widespread support for Ukrainian in medium to large urban centres in Ukraine. In January 1925, the party-cell of the Minsk Sewing Industry Workers, which operated exclusively in Yiddish, met to debate the 1924 resolution to promote the use of Belorussian in local Soviet agencies.21 Many of the workers, who were all Jewish, voiced their opposi- tion to Belorussian.22 One party-cell member pointed out that the peasant in the village not only spoke a version of Belorussian utterly incomprehensible to the city inhabitant, but the peasant was himself likely to understand Russian better than the city version of Belorussian. Another member compared Belorussian to Ukrainian, emphasizing that the Ukrainizatsiia campaign was much more reasonable, since “Ukraine has its own history and heroes, something that is missing here in Belorussia.” Of course the party-cell eventually Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 resolved to comply with party guidelines and called for the study of Belorussian and the liquidation of illiteracy in Belorussian among Jewish workers.23 But in most cases, instruc- tions about studying Belorussian were perceived as a formality and were generally ignored in practice.24 Resistance to the Belorussianization campaign was common not only among Jews but also among many Belorussians, Russians and Poles who had always lived in the city and for whom, following the 19th-century Tsarist Russification policy, Russian was the mother tongue. In October 1926, at the party-cell meeting of the factory Varshavianka, one member (possibly Belorussian) argued that, while “No one doubts that … at some point there was a Belorussian language … in our time, the Belorussian language and culture as such do not exist.” He also complained about the financial burden that the campaign for Belorussian entailed, not only with regard to the issuing of newspapers, journals and text-books in Belorussian, but also with respect to cultural and educational institutions such as the Institute for Belorussian Culture (Inbelkult) and the Belorussian Pedagogical Training College (Belpedtekhnikum). Finally, he argued that forcing the study of Belorussian in institutions of higher education (vuzy) and secondary schools was a waste of time for students, especially for Russian and Jewish students.25 At least with regard to the 1920s, I was not able to find similar remarks about Yiddish language and culture and the newly established Yiddish insti- tutions in Minsk. The interplay between four factors led many Jews to be positively inclined toward Yiddishization efforts and the use of Yiddish: (a) the official status of the Jewish language; (b) the low prestige of Belorussian; (c) the lack of knowledge of Belorussian; (d) the official disfavouring of Russian. Taking the floor in Yiddish at general party meetings to speak about general topics became a relatively common practice among Jewish activists in Minsk in the 1920s and early 1930s.26 In November 1928, at the party-cell meeting of the heavily Jewish clothing factory Minshvei, which included 155 Jewish members and six Belorussians, one comrade was interrupted when he tried to address the meeting in Belorussian. As another member reproachfully commented, “Shmidt did not behave correctly when he spoke in Belorussian at a Yiddish meeting.”27 One of the most compelling examples of the new status of Yiddish is from March 1927, when on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Red Army, the Minshvei party-cell refused to use Russian to collaborate with the Red Army, the official language of this promi- nent Soviet institution being Russian. During the 3 March meeting, the party-cell endorsed the following resolution: “Because our Party-cell is a Jewish one and operates in Yiddish … we cannot assist, separately, the Red Army in Russian … the question of creating relations with the Red Army should be removed from the meeting’s agenda.”28 While other political  96 ELISSA BEMPORAD and cultural institutions in the city were making plans to organize activities in collaboration with the Red Army, the party-cell of the Minshvei factory, was willing to interact with the Soviet armed forces in Yiddish only.29 This document indicates that local Jewish bodies applied Yiddishization as an absolute principle within Jewish ethnic settings like the Minsk factory Minshvei, and refused to conduct any work in Russian, even when afforded an oppor- tunity to do so. Indeed, Minsk was the ideal location for the thriving of Yiddish: on the one hand the financial support from the state; on the other hand, the lack of competition with Belorussian, the language that the party “ascribed” to the majority of the population of the republic, even to those Belorussian city residents who did not know it. The weakness of Belorussian only served to strengthen Yiddish. In this Jewish city, perhaps more than in other Soviet Jewish Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 urban centres, Yiddish enjoyed a distinctive standing that pre-existed the implementation of Soviet nationality policy and the launching of the Belorussianization campaign. To take a single but prominent example, on 15 July 1921, during the inauguration of Belorussian State University, the secretary of the Evsektsiia welcomed the event by addressing the audience in Yiddish.30 It is hard to imagine something similar taking place in Moscow, or in another large city of the Soviet Union, during the inauguration of a state university. Courts, Sports and Classrooms: Yiddish or Russian? As one of the languages used to promote the cultural renaissance of the peoples of Soviet Belorussia, Yiddish made its way into the city theatres through plays and concerts organized by the Belorussian Yiddish State Theatre and the Yiddish State Chorus, which regularly performed throughout Minsk.31 Together with the founders of modern Yiddish literature, whose works were presented as compatible with the Soviet Weltanschauung, the language penetrated the general cultural institutions of the city. The literary soirée celebrat- ing the tenth anniversary of the death of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem took place on 21 May 1926 as a public event in the Belorussian State Theatre. The key speaker at the event was literary critic Nokhum Oyslender, who lectured in Yiddish about the works of Sholem Aleichem, to a Belorussian, Russian and Jewish audience.32 As part of the Yiddish experiment, Yiddish also entered the legal sphere and became a juridical language. The Minsk Central Jewish Chamber was founded in January 1926. It func- tioned in Yiddish and served the whole Minsk district. Criminal cases, conflicts over alimony, and financial arguments were tried in the Yiddish court. In 1928, the Jewish Bureau of the District Committee stated that, since the date of its founding in 1926, the Minsk Jewish Court had established itself as an integral part of the general Soviet apparatus: “it was the accessi- bility in terms of language that led the Jewish population of the city and shtetlekh to place their trust in the Court.”33 One of the judges who served in the Soviet Jewish tribunal shortly after its establishment reported that 80% of Minsk Jews availed themselves of the Yiddish court, particularly those who were accused in criminal cases. The reasons for this success, explained the judge, were “first of all the language—in which one can argue things out—and secondly the milieu: there are … trials that require from the judge knowledge of the environ- ment, understanding of the conditions, the controversies, the customs, even the tone. For these [reasons] one comes to the Yiddish court.”34 But the absolute novelty of a legal institution operating in Yiddish also had its draw- back. As it turned out, the Jewish Court could not fully function like its Russian counterpart, which relied on centuries of a well-established legal tradition. While the Jewish Court had  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 97 a legal advisory board which served the Jewish population in Yiddish three times a week, petitions were frequently submitted in Russian and even Belorussian. In most cases, the lawyers took the floor in Yiddish. But as of May 1928 the public prosecutor often carried out his harangue in Russian. In other words, because of the deficiency of juridical terms, the court could not effectively function in Yiddish.35 While some lawyers were well versed in the new Yiddish legal jargon, others had received their training in Russian only and adjusted to the system with difficulty. I. J. Singer visited the Minsk Jewish Court in late 1926, during the hear- ing of a conflict over alimony between a man and his ex-wife. Singer noticed that the lawyer representing the ex-husband, a well-known lawyer “who knows the legal code as well as a religious Jew knows ashrei (one of the main prayers in Jewish liturgy), must now speak Yiddish and has trouble with it.” The lawyer began his speech with the ungrammatical words Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 khaveyrim rikhter (comrades judge)—which the judge promptly corrected to birger rikhter (citizen judge)—and for the rest of the trial the attorney spoke in a mixture of Yiddish and Russian.36 Yiddish was the language largely used by Minsk Jews during social events and leisure- time activities across the political spectrum. The Minsk Jewish youth group Yung-Skoyt, established shortly after World War I and associated with the socialist–Zionist movement, organized events for Jewish boys and girls of 12–16 years of age. With the goal of contribut- ing to their “spiritual development,” acquainting them with Jewish folk-creativity, and exposing them to Yiddish cultural treasures, the youth group also coordinated sporting events. The language of these activities, which ranged from gymnastics to hikes outside of the city and swimming lessons in the river Svisloch, was Yiddish.37 While the Jewish Scout Organization—together with numerous other youth groups in Minsk—made use of Yiddish prior to the launching of Soviet nationality policy, the creation of accurate Yiddish terms to refer to athletics and sports activities was the outcome of the Soviet Yiddish experiment. In other words, if the language used by the participants in these social events was commonly and nonchalantly Yiddish, the terms they employed to refer to specific aspects of athletics were usually Russian. In August 1921, the statute of the Jewish Sports and Touring Club of Minsk (also a pre-Revolutionary Jewish institution which was legalized by the Soviets in 1921, but liquidated shortly afterwards) emphasized that its offi- cial goal was not only the improvement of the physical condition and the training of Jewish youth, but also the formation of a new cadre of instructors for Soviet schools and kindergar- tens. In line with the requirements of the Soviet educational system, which in the Jewish context entailed the use of Yiddish in every sphere of instruction, the club’s leaders stated their commitment to “the creation of a gymnastics terminology in the Yiddish language [gimnastishe terminologye in der yidisher shprakh] to be introduced among children with poor knowledge of Russian.”38 The Jewish Sports Club “Hamer” (Hammer), formerly known as the Maccabi Club, was officially legalized on 14 December 1921. By early 1922, the club counted approximately 100 members. These were boys and girls whose ages ranged between 14 and 20, and who assiduously attended the club during its hours of operation every evening from 6.00 to 10.00 p.m., except Fridays. On 9 January 1922, the club organized courses for instructors of gymnastics in Soviet Yiddish schools. The three-month courses were divided between theo- retical sessions devoted to the study of human anatomy and physiology, and practical sessions for physical training three times a week. These courses were specifically designed for instructors of gymnastics in kindergartens and elementary schools.39 While sporting events for Jews were eventually incorporated into the activities organized by workers’ clubs,  98 ELISSA BEMPORAD the Komsomol, and party-cells, gymnastics instructors in Soviet Yiddish schools continued to train their students in Yiddish. With the creation of a large network of Soviet Yiddish schools, Yiddish became the language of Soviet Jewish education. By 7 January 1924, there were in Minsk ten Yiddish secondary schools with 2505 students and 141 teachers; eight children’s homes with 602 children and 77 teachers; seven kindergartens with 400 children and 34 teachers; a Jewish Pedagogical Training College with 175 students and 29 teachers.40 All of these insti- tutions functioned in Yiddish. But in order to make Yiddish a language of school education, a realm traditionally dominated by Russian, Jewish activists had to cope with the dearth of pedagogical literature and the absence of a well-established pedagogical tradition in Yiddish. They faced the chal- Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 lenge of building from scratch something that had little pre-existing foundation. By and large, Jewish pedagogues had been trained in Russian, had used Russian-language text- books in their pre-Revolutionary teaching experience and had published their articles in Russian-language pedagogical journals.41 When in May 1921, the Evsektsiia, the Minsk Executive Committee and a group of local activists and instructors organized preparatory courses in Yiddish to train a new cadre of Soviet Yiddish teachers, one of the questions debated was whether knowledge of Russian should be considered a prerequisite to attend the courses. M. Hoder, who later became instructor of Yiddish literature in several Yiddish institutions in the city, argued that knowing Russian was crucial for future teachers in so far as “for specific subjects … such as pedagogy … we do not have the essential literature in Yiddish.” On the other hand, Yudl Frankfurt, one of the founders of the Jewish Pedagogical Training College in Minsk, claimed that “knowledge of Russian is not important to us; more important is that [the future pedagogue] be generally mature and satisfy the rest of our requirements; [the lack of knowledge of Russian] will not hamper his enrollment in the courses … we will … translate from Russian into Yiddish specific portions of the literature and … if worse comes to worse we will … invite Russian teachers to teach Russian, as long as the Yiddish teacher is qualified for the rest of the work.”42 The creation of a new educational system in Yiddish was even more challenging when it came to teaching scientific subjects. As the Minsk teacher Goldberg pointed out, “there are no appropriate books” to teach mathematics in Yiddish. But indeed mathematics was taught in Yiddish, and not only in elementary school, but also in institutions of higher learning. When the Jewish Section of the Pedagogical Faculty of Belorussian State University was established, at the end of 1921, Yiddish became for the first time a language of instruction at the university level.43 Both Jewish and general subjects were taught in Yiddish. The 1928 curriculum, for example, included not only courses such as “The History of the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine,” “Economic History of the Jews of Russia,” “Modern and Contemporary Yiddish Literature” and “History of the Yiddish Language,” but also general courses such as “Political Economy,” “The History of Russia,” “Analytical Geometry,” “Inorganic Chemistry” and “Mathematics.”44 And yet, the promotion of Yiddish in the Jewish Section’s curriculum, in particular in the scientific courses, was frequently in conflict with the well-established practice of teach- ing in Russian. During the 1928–29 academic year 40% of the courses in the humanities and 10–15% of those not related to the humanities, were taught in Yiddish in the Jewish Section of the Pedagogical Faculty.45 In October 1933, the university’s party organization noted that the major shortcoming in the Faculty of Chemistry was the Jewish Section, which lacked instructors and textbooks in Yiddish.46  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 99 The Construction of a New Scholarly Centre In pre-Revolutionary Russia, the most important Jewish cultural and scholarly enter- prises were carried out in Russian and, to some extent, in Hebrew, in institutions located in St Petersburg and Odessa. Following the Bolsheviks’ rise to power Hebrew-language schol- arship and institutions were liquidated and by the early 1920s the language had been removed for good from the realm of Jewish culture, politics and Wissenschaft. While some Russian-language Jewish scholarly institutions continued to exist after the Revolution, they had to struggle for survival and face the consequences of the hostile labelling of “bourgeois organizations.”47 These institutions could no longer rely on the financial support of wealthy Jewish patrons—who had largely disappeared from Soviet Russia—and as “bourgeois” orga- nizations they did not qualify for state funding. Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 As Yiddish replaced Russian and became the new language of Jewish scholarship, the geography of Jewish cultural and scholarly centres was transformed. The focus shifted towards Ukraine and Belorussia, where the large majority of Jews resided and Yiddish was mostly spoken. Home to prominent Russian Jewish organizations such as OPE (Obshchestvo dlia rasprostranieniia prosveshchenie mezhdu evreiami, or Society for the Dissemination of Enlightenment among Jews) and the Jewish Ethnographic-Historical Society, St Petersburg was ousted in its role of leading cultural centre by the new rising centres located in the historic Pale of Settlement—an area regarded until then as the periphery of Jewish scholar- ship. One of these new centres was Minsk, a rather marginal place in the history of Jewish scholarship before the Revolution. With the establishment of new cultural and scholarly institutions, the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic became an important centre for Jewish research, partic- ularly for Yiddish scholarship. The rising interest in Jewish scholarship in Yiddish, fostered by the unprecedented state funding programme, brought to the assembly in Minsk of many scholars who had been intellectually active in other parts of Russia. The Marxist Jewish histo- rian Israel Sosis (b. 1878) had engaged in political and cultural activities in Odessa, Vilna and St Petersburg before moving to Minsk;48 the Yiddish philologist Mordechai Veinger (1890– 1929) had studied and worked in Warsaw, Moscow, Kharkov and Tashkent until 1923, when he moved to Minsk;49 and the literary historian Nokhum Oyslender (b. 1893) had studied in Berlin and Kiev and worked in Moscow before moving to Minsk.50 The image of Minsk as a new literary and cultural centre is summarized in the corre- spondence between two scholars of Yiddish literature, Nokhum Oyslender, a Kiev-born cultural activist who moved to Minsk in 1925, and Sh. A. Gurshtein, a Moscow-based literary critic who participated in Minsk publications throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In a letter to Oyslender dated 4 May 1925, Gurshtein complained about the situation in Moscow: compar- ing the Soviet capital with Minsk, he referred to Moscow as a literarishe goles, or literary exile, where it was hard to retrieve the latest Yiddish publications (“in all of Moscow there is not even one issue of ‘Di royte velt’ [The Red World, issued in Kharkov]”); he also contrasted the promising status of Yiddish studies in Minsk with its uncertain status in Moscow (“what will be in Moscow, and what it will turn into, I cannot foresee”).51 Founded in 1921, the Jewish Division of the Institute for Belorussian Culture (Institut Belorusskoi kul’tury or Inbelkult) was the first incorporation of Jewish studies into a Soviet institution of academic research. The official description of the institution read, The Institute for Belorussian Culture is a … state-sponsored academic institution in Belorussia, under the supervision of the People’s Commissariat for Education. Its goal … [is]  100 ELISSA BEMPORAD the research of Belorussia from the vantage point of language, literature, ethnography, history, nature, economics, social movements, etc. … A Jewish Division is established for the research of the Jewish language, literature, history and ethnography … The Institute for Belorussian Culture may open museums, libraries, archives, publishing houses, research centres … publish scholarly journals and monographs of scholarly, artistic and popular nature … All the publications of the Institute must be issued in Belorussian … The Jewish Division publishes its works in Yiddish.52 In order to create the new scholarly centre Minsk sought to attract resources not only from throughout the Soviet Union, but also from abroad. In 1925, the administrator of the Jewish Division addressed two well-known Yiddish scholars who lived in New York at the Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 time, the folklorist Y. L. Kahan and the linguist Yehuda Joffe. Not only were they asked to contribute to the institute’s academic journal Tsaytshrift, but they were also invited to leave New York, move to Minsk and work in the Jewish Division in the field of Yiddish research. This invitation was made in all seriousness.53 When I. J. Singer met with some of the cultural activ- ists employed in the Jewish Division, he was told that “We would like to get scholars like Dubnow … so that the world would have the greatest trust in our scholarly academy … We will forgive them all [their] sins, as long as [they] come and work for us.”54 The establishment of the Jewish Division at Inbelkult preceded the founding of the Vilna YIVO Institute for Jewish Research by four years. Its journal Tsaytshrift—possibly the most impressive Yiddish scholarly journal issued in the Soviet Union in the 1920s—published contributions from Vilna-based scholars such as Zalmen Rejzen and Max Weinreich. This phenomenon is indicative of the fact that Minsk was recognized as a major academic centre and Vilna scholars participated in its work. While critical of Marxist scholarship, literary histo- rian Israel Tsinberg reviewed positively the first volume of Tsaytshrift, and acknowledged that, together with Vilna, Minsk had become the new centre for Jewish scholarship in the Yiddish language.55 The creation of a Yiddish scholarly centre impinged upon the everyday life of the city as well. The new Yiddish academic intelligentsia that assembled in this once provincial city became integral to Jewish cultural life of Minsk. Through lectures and public programmes held in the city’s clubs, theatres and schools, and regularly advertised in the local Minsk page of the Yiddish daily newspaper Oktiaber, the new academic intelligentsia became a unique source of pride for Jewish Minsk, sanctioning its transformation from periphery to capital of Soviet Yiddish Wissenschaft. Conclusion The official status of Yiddish, the state support for cultural, educational and scholarly enterprises, the establishment of a Jewish Section at the Belorussian State University and the creation of a Jewish Division in the most important academic institution of the republic (Inbelkult, and later the Belorussian Academy of Sciences), made Minsk one of the most successful examples of the Yiddish experiment in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, this experiment was quintessentially Soviet. It originated in the Soviet nation-state-building project based on territorial nationalities and on the idea that the Jews, who were lacking a major territorial concentration, could be identified as a national group by virtue of the linguistic category only. On the other hand, the Yiddish experiment, which lasted in Minsk a total of 18 years, was embedded in solid foundations, some of which dated back to  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 101 the pre-Revolutionary period.56 In addition to the government support for Yiddish, we can identify four main reasons that promoted the success of the Yiddish experiment in Minsk: (a) By the end of the nineteenth century Minsk had become, after Vilna, the greatest centre of the Jewish labour movement in the Russian Empire. Bundism caught on in Minsk (as well as in other urban centres of historic Jewish Lithuania) because of the large proportion of Jews in the working force and the nature of the Jewish political leadership, likely to be less accul- turated and Russified in the northwestern regions of the empire than in Ukraine and Poland.57 The deeply rooted Bundist tradition of Minsk contributed to the use of Yiddish in lieu of alternative linguistic channels, not only among those former Bundists who joined the Evsektsiia after the Revolution and strove, with great determination, to build a Yiddish bureaucratic and political system from scratch, but also among Jews who worked in the city Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 post office or in the clothing factory Minshvei and who—because of their Bundist back- ground—demonstrated a stronger commitment to the cause of Yiddish than most Jews living in the urban centres of Ukraine or Russia. (b) The relatively small size of Minsk compared with cities like Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, together with its provincial character, which the city retained even after its transformation into a Soviet capital, guaranteed the preservation of Jewish enclaves throughout the 1930s. In his autobiographical short stories, writer Arkadii Kapilov described Zamkovaia Street (also known in Yiddish as Shlos gas)—where the Jewish community had established numer- ous institutions during the 18th and 19th centuries—as an overwhelmingly Jewish neigh- bourhood in 1941.58 In Minsk, as well as in other small to medium-size cities, the Soviet regime did not manage to uproot the historical continuity of Jewish urban spaces, and Yiddish continued to be spoken and heard on the streets of the city until the eve of the war. (c) There was a direct relation between the socio-economic background of the Jewish popula- tion of the city and their language knowledge and use. While a considerable fraction of Minsk Jews readily left the city for Russian-speaking Moscow and Leningrad throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Belorussian capital absorbed thousands of Jews from the surrounding shtetlekh and smaller cities who moved to Minsk in search of employment and a better live- lihood. These were mostly poor Jews who spoke Yiddish. Their constant influx inevitably affected Jewish life in Minsk.59 (d) Finally, the position of Yiddish was enhanced by the Jews’ lack of support for Belorussian, a language that, at least in the city, never represented a real alternative for Jewish residents. In other words, Yiddish was never truly in competition with Belorussian as much as it was with Ukrainian in Ukrainian urban centres. As late as October 1935, for example, the instruc- tor of Belorussian language in a Soviet Yiddish school in Minsk would speak Belorussian to the students while they would reply in Yiddish.60 The strongest evidence of the success of the Minsk experiment vis-à-vis other major urban centres in the Soviet Union can be found in the following statistical data from 1927 and 1939 respectively: (a) According to the school census of 15 December 1927, in Odessa, where the Jews made up for 36.4% of the population, the proportion of students of all school-aged children attend- ing Yiddish schools was 9%; in Kiev, where the Jews made up for 27.3% of the population, this proportion was 8%; in Kharkov, where the Jews were 19.4% of the population, this proportion was 2.9%.61 In Minsk, on the other hand, where the Jews made up 40.8% of the total population, the proportion of students of all school-aged children attending Yiddish  102 ELISSA BEMPORAD schools was 55.3% for elementary school (perviy kontsenter) and 28.2% for middle school (vtoroy kontsenter).62 (b) The available statistics about the mother tongue of Soviet Jews on the eve of the Holocaust confirm the overall trend indicated by the 1927 school data. In 1939, 22.8% of the Jews in Kharkov declared Yiddish their mother tongue, in Odessa 32.2% and in Kiev 34%. In Minsk, on the other hand, almost half of the city’s Jewish population, or 49.8%, declared Yiddish their mother tongue. This was the largest percentage in any major city of the Soviet Union.63 While most Minsk Jews were not passionately committed to the Soviet Yiddish exper- iment and were not directly engaged in its political and bureaucratic apparatus, a consider- Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 able fraction of Minsk Jews continued to favour Yiddish over Russian and Belorussian. Yiddishization was, arguably, not forced upon the Jewish street with the same intensity with which Belorussianization was imposed on Belorussians and non-Belorussians alike. Those Jews who wished to join the higher party echelons adopted Russian; in search of urban employment, some Jews even switched over to Belorussian. But many Jews chose Yiddish. During his travels to Russia, I. J. Singer captured the distinctive nature of the Yiddish experiment in Minsk. Comparing the role of Yiddish in the life of Moscow with the role of Yiddish in the life of Minsk, he noted the following: more than in Moscow, Jewish life makes sense and has a substance [in Minsk]. Of course, Moscow has … many more Jews than Minsk. Moscow has a Yiddish chamber-theatre, publishing houses, clubs, a Jewish faculty, courses, and the Jewish leaders and Yiddish writers are in Moscow—but against the backdrop of stony true-Russian, church-filled Moscow, Jewish life appears like a strange blemish, a bit of nonsense … In Minsk, the Yiddish signs, the schools, the courses, the theatre, the newspaper, the courtroom, the scholarly institute— are something natural. It was unnatural that they did not exist before the Revolution.64 NOTES 1. The resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia anticipated the establishment of 20–30 Jewish national centres on the territory of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. These were areas in which 75–80% of the total popu- lation was Jewish. Natsionalniy Arkhiv Respubliki Belarus’ (National Archive of the Belarus’ Republic, hereafter NARB), f. 42, op. 1, d. 1632, l. 50. 2. In 1923, the Jewish residents of Minsk numbered 48,312 and constituted 43.6% of the city population (the non-Jewish population made up 56.4% of the city residents, 62,614 people). In 1926, the Jews numbered 53,686. While their percentage of the total population had dropped to 40.8%, they still constituted the single largest national group in the city after the Belorussians: 43% of the city population was Belorussian, over 40% was Jewish, 10% was Russian and a little over 3% was Polish. “Minsk,” in Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklope- diia [The Great Soviet Encyclopedia] (Moscow, 1926), Vol. 39, 465–68. 3. See Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics; Altshuler, Ha-yevsektsya bi-vrit ha- mo’atsot; Krutikov, “Between Mysticism and Marxism” and “Yasha Bronshteyn;” Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish; Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre; and Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture. 4. Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce, 258. 5. Greenbaum, Jewish Scholarship and Scholarly Institutions in Soviet Russia, 6.  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 103 6. The text of the declaration of independence of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic can be found in Prakticheskoe razreshenie natsionalnogo voprosa v Belorusskoi SSR [Practical Solution of the National Question in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic], Central Executive Committee of the Belorussian SSR, Central Commission of Nationalities, Part I, Minsk, 1927, 120–23. 7. Prakticheskoe razreshenie natsionalnogo voprosa, 134–35. 8. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 152–53. 9. For more on the Soviet nationality policy and the korenizatsiia campaign, see Simon, Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union. On practical measures used to implement the nationality policy in Belorussia and specific aspects of the Belorussianization campaign, see Prakticheskoe razreshenie natsionalnogo voprosa, 133– Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 46. For an assessment of the achievements and failures of the Belorusizatsiia campaign in the 1920s, see Zeltser, Belorusizatsiia 1920-kh gg.,” 60–92. On the role that ethnography played in Soviet nation-building, see Hirsch, Empire of Nations. 10. On the history of Belorussia, see Vakar, Belorussia. 11. The Belorussian Socialist Party, known as “Belorusskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Gromada,” was founded in Vilna, in 1903. 12. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 149–50. For more on the making of Belorussia, see pp. 151–55. 13. Prakticheskoe razreshenie natsionalnogo voprosa, 132–33. 14. Singer, Nay-Rusland, 25. I thank Gennady Estraikh and Debby Yalen for bringing Singer’s travelogue to my attention. 15. A resolution to broadcast a radio-newspaper in Yiddish once a week was passed in mid- 1926. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1803, l. 12; A number of movies produced by the Belorussian State Film company (Belgoskino) were shown with Yiddish subtitles. See Osherovitch, “Mobilizirn di visnshaft tsu dinst fun 2-tn finfyor,” 4. 16. NARB, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1432, ll. 26, 38. During the 1927 elections of the Minsk district party committee, electoral notices were issued in the following languages and quantities: 460,000 in Belorussian, 55,000 in Yiddish, 20,000 in Polish, 1000 in Lithuanian and 500 in Latvian. 17. See, for example, Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Minskoi Oblasti (State Archive of Minsk Oblast, hereafter GAMO), f. 12, op. 2, d. 1453, ll. 32, 77–78; and GAMO, f. 12, op. 2, d. 1453, ll. 32, 77–78. 18. See, for example, GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 758, ll. 138–39, 225, 238, 756–57. 19. GAMO, f. 591, op. 1, d. 13, ll. 44–45. 20. See Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 400–1; and Altshuler, Ha-yevsektsya bi- vrit ha-mo’atsot, 169. 21. The resolution stated that by early 1925 all regional and central offices, agencies and insti- tutions of the Belorussian Republic were expected to cease operating in Russian and start functioning in Belorussian only. To implement the new policy, the NKVD (People’s Commis- sariat for Internal Affairs) recommended that all employees study Belorussian and carry out office work in Belorussian. NARB, f. 4, op. 1, d. 669, ll. 5, 38. 22. It should be noticed that while Jews generally opposed Belorussian, there were a few Jewish writers who opted for Belorussian as the language of their literary activity; among them, Shmuel Nokhem Plavnik (1886–1941), who wrote as “Zmiatrok Biadulia,” Ales’ (Aizik) Kuchar (b. 1910) and Mikhas’ (Mendel) Model’ (1904–80). See Selemenev and Zeltser, “The Jewish Intelligentsia and the Liquidation of Yiddish Schools in Belorussia,” 81, n. 10. 23. At the same time, the party-cell emphasized the importance of strengthening Yiddish culture, particularly through political and pedagogical texts. GAMO, f. 1260, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 38, 78.  104 ELISSA BEMPORAD 24. The party recommended that all political and cultural activists in the city be literate in Belorussian. In early 1927, three applicants were considered for employment at the Evpedtekhnikum, the Jewish Pedagogical College that trained teachers for Soviet Yiddish schools. Alexander Vitkin, who applied for the position of library director, Evsei Bialiy, who applied for the position of gymnastics instructor, and Anna Raskina, who applied for the position of first-year Yiddish teacher, were asked whether they knew Belorussian. All three admitted had no knowledge of Belorussian. They were hired, but were advised to study the language. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1892, l. 12. 25. GAMO, f. 37, op. 1, d. 1228, ll. 54–72. When it came to implementing the party directive about national work in Belorussian, the members of the party-cell of the Minsk United Professional School (Minskaia obedinennaia profshkola) unanimously stated the following: “We don’t Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 like the Belorussian language; students run away from the class of Belorussian … there is no need [for Belorussian]. There is the Belorussian Pedagogical Training College, people can study there and teach the Belorussian language in the villages.” In one section of the party- cell, continued the protest, “Belorusizatsiia holds a formal character and is applied to the writing of protocols and minutes, but rarely to speeches; in the district, Belorussianization is applied only to written instructions and protocols, whereas meetings and plenary sessions are generally held in Russian.” See GAMO, f. 428, op. 1, d. 297, ll. 141–43. 26. See, for example, NARB, f. 63, op. 2, d. 233, ll. 4–7. 27. GAMO, f. 1260, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 37–41. 28. GAMO, f. 37, op. 1, d. 1198, ll. 13–14. 29. On the prominence of this institution in Soviet life, see Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship. 30. NARB, f. 4, op. 1, d. 55, ll. 118–19. 31. GAMO, f. 320, op. 1, d. 249, l. 43. 32. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, hereafter RGALI), f. 2270, op. 1, d. 294; see, also, RGALI, f. 2270, op. 1, d. 158. In a letter to Sh. A. Gurshtein, dated 20 May 1926, Nokhum Oyslender wrote, “one more appear- ance in the City Theatre (it must last 40 minutes and this time I speak in Yiddish for a Belorussian audience—oh, how lucky! But we must!).” 33. A sign of the court’s growing popularity among Jews was the large public attending the hearings. In some cases the litigants’ parents came to Minsk ‘from America …Yiddish writ- ers who were in Minsk visited the Courtroom regularly.” See GAMO, f 3, op. 1, d. 172, l. 38, and GAMO, f. 423, op. 14, d. 68, ll. 3–4. 34. Singer, Nay-Rusland, 33. 35. GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 561, ll. 15, 32–33. In October 1925, in the months immediately preced- ing the inauguration of the Minsk Central Jewish Chamber, the appointed judge travelled to Ukraine—where Yiddish courts had been operating for some time—to learn how to organize a Yiddish court and master Yiddish legal terminology. See, GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 164, ll. 1, 2–4, 14–15. 36. Singer, Nay-Rusland, 32. 37. The Yiddish Scout Organization (in Russian, Minskaia Evreiskaia Organizatsiia Molodezhi “Yung-Skoyt;” in Yiddish, Minsker yidisher yugnt organizatsye “Yung-Skoyt”) had a club, and a library with a reading room, and planned to publish its own journal. For more infor- mation on the Jewish organization Yung-Skoyt, see NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1140, ll. 21–25. 38. In August 1921, the club counted 150 active members, most of whom were young children under 13. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1140, ll. 26–27.  YIDDISH EXPERIMENT IN SOVIET MINSK 105 39. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1132, ll. 39–42. The club was called Yidisher Sport Klub Hamer in Yiddish, and Evreiskii Gimnasticheskii Klub Molot in Russian. The Evsektsiia closed down the club in early August 1922, because of “the hidden influence of Zionist elements.” NARB, f. 4, op. 1, d. 580, l. 56. 40. NARB, f. 4, op. 1, d. 816, l. 71. See also NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1604, ll. 8–12. 41. In January 1922, the administrative meeting of the Jewish Pedagogical Training College acknowledged that the majority of the teachers had received their education in Russian schools and therefore required additional instruction in Yiddish, in particular, with regard to methodology. 42. Yiddish schools introduced the study of Russian as part of the curriculum in June 1921. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 72, ll. 4, 7, 9–12, 19–22, 25–26. Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 43. The People’s Commissariat for Education endorsed the decision to establish a Jewish Section in the city’s university in June 1921; NARB, f. 4, op. 1, d. 430, ll. 38, 48. See also RGASPI, f. 445, op. 1, d. 64, l. 76. 44. GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 851, l. 37. 45. GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 851, l. 77. See also Shriftn fun vaysrusishn universitet [Proceedings of Belorussian University], Vaysrusisher Melukhisher Universitet [Belorussian State University], Minsk, 1929, p. 158. 46. GAMO, f. 164, op. 5, d. 176, ll. 15–28. 47. For example, the prestigious scholarly journal Evreiskaia Starina (Jewish Antiquity)— founded by historian Simon Dubnow in 1908—was issued until 1930. 48. Rejzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 602–605. 49. Rejzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese, un filologye, 945–48. See, also, NARB, f. 205, op. 3, d. 1204, ll. 5–7, 40–41. 50. Rejzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, 51–3. See, also, NARB, f. 205, op. 1, d. 5947, ll. 1, 3–4. 51. RGALI, f. 2270, op. 1, d. 72, 4 May 1925, letter from Gurshtein to Oyslender. On Moscow as a centre for Yiddish cultural life in the post-1917 era, see Estraikh “Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ v poslerevolutsionnoi Moskve,” 187–212. 52. NARB, f. 42, op. 1, d. 1642, ll. 11–14. For more on the history on the Jewish Division of Inbelkut, see Gerasimova, “K istorii evreiskogo otdela Instituta belorusskoi kultury (Inbelkulta) i evreiskogo sektora Belorusskoi Akademii nauk v 20–30xx godokh,” 144–67. 53. Central Zionist Archive, J122 Collection Sefer Minsk (not catalogued); letter from Inbelkult, Minsk, to Yehuda L. Kahan, New York, 22 July 1925; letter from Inbelkult, Minsk, to Yehuda Joffe, New York, 9 September 1925. 54. Singer, Nay-Rusland, p. 35. 55. Tsinberg, “Novye raboty po evreiskoi etnografii i yazykovedeniu,” 341. 56. In July 1938, the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR decided to terminate the official status of Yiddish as a state language in the Belorussian Republic, and to liquidate most Yiddish insti- tutions in the city. See Zeltser and Selimenev, “The Jewish Intelligentsia and the Liquidation of Yiddish Schools in Belorussia,” 78–97. For the original document on the liquidation of Yiddish institutions in Minsk, see also NARB, f. 4, op. 3, d. 575, l. 287. 57. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale. 58. Kapilov, Zamkovaia 2/7. 59. Mordechai Altshuler emphasizes the influence that the shtetl had on urban Jewish life in the Soviet Union until World War II. See Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust, 45–46. 60. GAMO, f. 164, op. 1, d. 428, ll. 23–26. Nina Rogov, a native of Minsk who lived in the city until the eve of the German invasion, confirms this tendency. She recalls that in 1938, when the  106 ELISSA BEMPORAD language of instruction in Soviet Yiddish schools became Belorussian, teachers would address students in Belorussian, while students responded in Yiddish. Interview with Nina Rogov, 13 March 2005, New York. 61. This data is from Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, 136. 62. GAMO, f. 12, op. 1, d. 851, l. 4. During the academic year 1927–28, there were 3859 Jewish students attending Yiddish schools, and 2816 Jewish students enrolled in Russian or Belorussian schools (the total of Jewish students enrolled in schools in Minsk was 6675.) In 1928–29, the number of students enrolled in Soviet Yiddish schools increased to 4042 and the number of Jewish students in Russian and Belorussian Soviet schools decreased to 2718 (the total of Jewish students enrolled in schools in Minsk was 6760). See GAMO, f. 320, op. 1, d. 599, l. 18. Downloaded by [Jewish Theological Seminary JTS] at 11:33 13 November 2012 63. Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust, 277. 64. Singer, Nay-Rusland, 28–29. REFERENCES Altshuler, Mordechai. Ha-yevsektsya bi-vrit ha-mo’atsot: beyn komunizm ve-leumiyut. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po’alim, 1981. —. Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile. Jerusalem: Centre for Research of East European Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998. Estraikh, Gennady. “Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ v poslerevolutsionnoi Moskve” [Yiddish Literary Life in Post-Revolutionary Moscow]. Arkhiv Evreiskoi Istorii [Archive of Jewish History], edited by O. V. Budnitskii. Vol. 2. Moscow: Rosspen, 2005. —. Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development. 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Elissa Bemporad recently completed her PhD in the History Department at Stanford Univer- sity. Currently she is working on revising her dissertation, entitled “Red Star on the Jewish Street: The Reshaping of Jewish Life in Soviet Minsk, 1917–1939,” into a book.