SESSION ON RUSSIAN JEWISH HISTORY
Vassili Schedrin
NO MORE CRIES!
HISTORY OF THE REFORM JEWISH CONGREGATION IN ST. PETERSBURG IN THE 1900S
My paper is intended to represent new "documents" on Russian Jewish history announced in the title of this section. Its only purpose is to expose some newly found sources in the light of their contemporary background and more broader historical context.
I would like to start with a story about the incident happened in St. Petersburg at the end of 1909. The story based on the documents of the Department of religious affairs of the foreign faiths at the Ministry of internal affairs (MVD) of the Russian Empire.
The story began on September 19, 1909 when the information called "Jewish reform congregation" appeared in the newspaper "Volyn" in Zhitomir. It reported about the establishment of the reform Jewish congregation in St. Petersburg. "According to the founders, all the defects of the old traditional synagogue will be removed from the new congregation in terms of appearance and ideology as well." Some particular innovations were also reported: Sunday services, use of Russian language for parayers and reading of Tora, elimination of some "outdated" traditional prayers from the ritual, mixed minyan of men and women, decoration of prayerhouse by fine paintings and music supplementing services. A number of philantropic and cultural institutions were also planned under the auspices of the congregation. A principal founder of the new religious institution was Naum Pereferkovich - doctor of Oriental languages famous for his Russian translation of Mishna.
A few days later this information drew an attention of the officials at the Department of religious affairs. On September 29, 1909 a deputy director of the Department requested additional information from the St. Peterburg city administaration. At the same time Dr. Kreps (who was holding the position of "learned Jew" at the Ministry of internal affairs) was ordered to investigate the case. On October 9, 1909 Kreps forwarded his investigation report to the director of the Department. Here are some outlines of this document.
Naum Pereferkovich, 38, born in Stavropol (South Russia), of Jewish faith. Principal occupation: man of letters, also teaches Jewish law at several schools in St. Petersburg. Around 1905 - 1906 he spent a year in America (New York). In 1908 as a candidate for the position of St. Petersburg communal rabbi he delivered a sermon in the main synagogue of the city, soon after, it become clear that he had no chance to win his run for rabbinate.
On September 12, 1909 Pereferkovich published an anouncement in St. Petersburg newspapers about his intention to form reform Jewish congregation. He called St. Petersburg Jews to join his endeavor. About 30 people reacted to the announcement by joining Pereferkovich. The founding group came up with a draft program of the reform congregation including the following basic regulations: reform congregation is by no means set up out of the mainstream Jewry; the proposed reform does not touch upon the spirit of Judaism but only its interpretation; the congregation "preserves the ancient form of public worship" - assembly for prayer and sermon supplemented with music; it meets regularly on Sundays and on Jewish holidays, and for special ocasions and celebrations like "ceremony of confirmation for children"; the congregation acknowledges equal rights for women and men in the "administrative and religious affairs".
On the basis of these draft regulations Kreps concluded in his report: "This group might be defined as a sect dropped off the mainstream Jewry". (This is his only conclusion noted and underlined in the text by director of the Department). The key point in the Kreps' conclusion is that the group denied Talmudic interpretation of Judaism, it "does not accept what is sacred and essential for the rest of religious Jewry". What the group is practicing is "Biblical" not traditional "Talmudic" Judaism.
Kreps also concluded that the congregation is most likely to fail because of the hositility to the case of the majority of Russian Jewry. He wrote that even those in Russian Jewish intelligentsia considering reforms in Judaism indispensable "do not want radical changes in tradition … and do not regard Prefekovich as a man of unquestioned authority in reforming religion as his predecessors in the West were". Kreps also noted that Jews of St. Petersburg exposed openly their negative attitude to Preferkovich. The administaration of the Choir synagogue (the main congregation in the city) asked principals of those schools where Pereferkovich teaches to disallow him to teach Jewish law, because he dropped off the "faith of our fathers".
On October 12, 1909 Pereferkovich wrote an open letter to "those cursing the reform congregation in St. Petersburg by all Biblical curses". The letter called "No more cries!" was published in St. Petersburg Yiddish daily "Der Fraind". Responding to his opponents Pereferkovich repeatedly stressed that the idea of reform congregation originates in the intimate circle of his friends and their families. Their original and, in fact, the only intention was to form "a family min'yan for us and our children … the place where our children would have an opportunity to learn something about the Tora and Jewishness, where our wifes can pray together with their husbands and children". In other words the congregation represented a very small group of St. Petersburg Jews (30 members according to Kreps, 56 members according to Pereferkovich, in the city with Jewish population of 50-60 thousand with its main synagogue with membership of 300-400 people). Indeed, the congregation had no intention of a large-scale reform of Judaism in Russia. Its members' goal was rather to experiment with their identity and to prove themselves that "we are also true Jews, but we are modern Jews and value the basis and moral in our religion" as Pereferkovich put it. He continued arguing with his opponents: "Wait with your criticism before we legalize our congregation. Then you might criticize if you still find anything to criticize". But Pereferkovich's initiative had failed shortly.
Response to the request of the Department of religious affairs from the office of the city adminstaration of St. Peterburg of December 16, 1909 put an end to the story. The response reported facts testifying to Kreps' conclusions: "Pereferkovich was removed from the balloting to St. Petersburg rabbinate because he did not share traditional religious beliefs of the majority of Jews, then, he attempted the establishment of reform Jewish congregation but he find no sympathy to his effort among the Jews". The reform congregation was denied registration.
This incident attained just a brief ironic notion in 3-page-long article on Reform Judaism (and none at all in the article on Jewish community of St. Petersburg) in the fundamental Russian Jewish Encyclopedia of 1913. The same attitude is typical for almost all contemporary scholarship and general works (memoirs including) devoted to Russian-Jewish history and history of Jewish community of St. Petersburg in particular. However, this attempt of setting up Reform Judaism on Russian soil definitely deserves a careful study. I will try here in brief to put it into the broader context of Russian Jewish history, to establish links and draw the parallels between the facts and ideas.
First, it was the obvious direct link between the program of the St. Peterburg reform congregation and the ideas of Moses Leib Lilienblum, prominent thinker and writer of the later Russian Haskalah. Lilienblum "came to challenge the authority the Shulhan Aruch, which he hoped to displace by a new code of Jewish law, and then the Talmud itself, declaring … that even in its halakhic elements it was essentially a human product subject to revision by later generations. The Talmud remained authoritative for Lilienblum only as a model of religious adaptation, found principally upon the spirit of reform, not as a sacred text". Similar statements we saw in the program of the St. Peterburg reform congregation: " The proposed reform does not touch upon the spirit of Judaism but only its interpretation which represents entirely "a product of the 20th century, similarly to the Talmudic interpretation of Judaism that was a product of its own times". Kreps evaluated the congregation by the same token: "The group denied Talmudic interpretation of Judaism … its founders plan to come up with new forms, based on their new interpretation, for rituals of birth, marriage, divorce and burial".
Second, the attempt of Jewish intelligentsia to implement radical religious reform in Judaism was not alone in Russia. Reform Jewish congregation in St. Petersburg has its indirect predecessors - groups called Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood founded in Rostov-on-Don in 1880 by Yakov Gordin (subsequently the famous Yiddish playwright) and New Israel formed in Odessa in 1882 by Yakov Priluker, a teacher at Jewish elementary school. Both was officially recognized by the authorities, and maintained their own synagogues. In 1883 the Brotherhood and New Israel merged. They both seized their activities by the end of the 1880s. Despite the considerable differences in their programs (Brotherhood mostly concerned about social and religious issues, New Israel, on the other hand, was almost Judeo-Christian missonary institution) the groups had a lot in common. Both was evidently formed as a response of Jewish intelligentsiia to the "great pogroms" of 1880 (their bent for integration into the Russian society and their location in Southern Russia are among the important facts testifying to this conclusion). As for their religious reform agenda, both was set up on the basis of "Biblical Judaism", both rejected the Talmud, both used Russian in their services, both acknowledges women's equality and so on. Perhaps, the hostile attitude of the mainstream Russian Jewry faced by both groups and their final failure to survive (the Brotherhood was prohibited by the authorities and New Israel broke up because of the loss of the official support) created the precedent for judging Preferkovich's attempt of a quite different nature 20 years later.
Third, the incident in St. Petersburg had its direct historical paralles in the beginning of the 20th century. Pereferkovich's visit to the United states in 1905 - 1906 mentioned by Kreps seems important for the study of St. Petersburg reform congregation. We know almost nothing about this visit but I suppose, that the fact that "by the eve of World War I … only in the United States had Reform Judaism won large-scale adherence and achieved considerable success in implementing the Reform program" was of significant influence for Pereferkovich and finally motivated him in his endeavor. It was 1908, immidiately after his return to Russia, when he started seeking active involvement into Jewish communal and religious life: run for St. Petersburg chief rabbinate in 1908, and attempted establishment of the reform congregation in 1909. One example of this influence is an invention of Sunday services planned by St. Petersburg reform congregation (at that time "in Germany only the independent Reform Congregation of Berlin worshiped exclusively on Sundays … In America the Sunday movement spread … to about three dozen synagogues, including some of the largest, and it continued to win new adherents").
There was also more immediate and recently documented parallel to the St. Petersburg incident. In 1910 a conflict broke out between the administration of the Brody synagogue and the Council of Jewish religious administrations in Odessa. The conflict was caused by installation of pipe organ in the Brody synagogue strongly opposed by the traditionalists from the the Council of Jewish religious administrations as a "an offspring of the reform Judaism originating in the West" and "a disastrous change of Jewish religion". Seeking support from baron David Gintsburg (one of the key figures in the Russian Jewry of that time) one of the members of the Brody synagogue wrote: "It would be of great significanse to attest now that every congregation is free to choose any form of services appropriate for its members". The issue of freedom of choice in religious matters is also among the key components in the Pereferkovich's program: "We consider practice of religious observance an issue of individual choice and concern".
St. Petersburg Jewish congregation, as descibed in documents, fits almost perfectly into the definition of the reform movement in the Russian Empire given by Michael Meyer. It was "a propagation of religious reform by semi-secular intellectuals, because of the absence of an effective rabbinical initiative"; it had quite radical nature; it had to deal with the hostile political environment; finally, it was modelled on the parctice of reform congregations in the West (it includes sermon, confirmation ceremony, use of the vernacular, Sunday services, etc.). Meyer also assumed that "perhaps the most important reasons for the failure of reform ideas and institutions to spread more broadly in Russian Jewry lay outside the community ... In Russia, where Orthodox Christianity did not achieve, unlike Christianity in the West, a synthesis of religion with modern philosophy or science, the period of reform proposals coincided with the increasing popularity of an antimetaphysical positivism which left no room for a religious faith whose authoritative texts had been shown to be the product of historical evolution". This conclusion almost true for the second half of the 19th century hardly corresponds to the first decade of the 20th century. This period known as a "Silver Age" of Russian culture is distinguished precisely by flourishing of metaphysical ideas among Russian intellectuals when the works of Berdiaev, Florenskii, Frank and other Russian religious philosophers, aimed at the spiritual renewal of Russian Christian ortodoxy, drew a wide attention in the country. But reexamination of Meyer's conclusion is not my purpose now.
In the particular case of the St. Petersburg reform Jewish congregation I would rather conclude that its failure was a consequence of the government policy in regulating Jewish religious issues in the Russian Empire. This policy, implemented as early as 1844 by the abolition of the kahal, was aimed at decentralization in the Jewish communal self-government. This, for example, explains the fact that in the first decade of the 20th century there were six officially recognized Jewish congregations in St. Petersburg in addition to the Choir synagogue (almost all of them were more orthodox than the main city's congregation). No surprise, therefore that the Ministry of internal affairs in its policy of decentralization at the beginning of the 20th century considered traditional secluded forms of Jewish religious institutions more reliable and secure than radical reform enterprises based ideologically on the Western models.