Metadata : Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; Zhitomir, Volhynia Province
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the Zhitomir Region
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний архів Житомирської області
- Postal address:
- 2/20 Ohrimova Hora Str.. Zhytomyr, 10003, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (0412) 42-48-00
- Web address:
- http://archive.zt.gov.ua/
- Email:
- archive_zt@arch.gov.ua
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the Zhitomir Region
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний архів Житомирської області
- Postal address:
- 2/20 Ohrimova Hora Str.. Zhytomyr, 10003, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (0412) 42-48-00
- Web address:
- http://archive.zt.gov.ua/
- Email:
- archive_zt@arch.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 396
- Title:
- Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; Zhitomir, Volhynia Province
- Title (official language):
- Житомирское раввинское училище, г. Житомир Волынской губ.; Житомирське рабинське училище, м. Житомир Волинської губ.
- Creator/accumulator:
- Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary
- Date(s):
- 1847/1873
- Language:
- Russian
- Hebrew
- Extent:
- 803 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Included are directives pertaining to the whole period of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary’s activity: the Statute on Rabbinical Seminaries (1847); orders of the Ministry of Education; and circulars and proposals for circulars of the administration and superintendent of the Kiev Educational District, including the order (1873) reorganising the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary as the Jewish Teachers’ Institute beginning with the 1873-74 school year.
Information on the functioning of the seminary and on the nature of its educational process is contained in “Brief notes on the actions and state of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary from 1847 through 1852”; files and correspondence “On the inspection of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary by state school inspector Mogilianskii” (1850), and on the results of a “visitation” [vizitatsiia] of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary by the “learned Jew” M. Rubinshtein on behalf of the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District (1858); instructions for students of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary and rules for pupils living in the general students’ quarters (1862); minute-logs of sessions of the seminary’s academic council; curricula and syllabuses; reports of the director on his work and dispatches to the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District; annual reports and materials on same; “seven-day” reports of the senior inspector on the state of the seminary and its students’ quarters; and correspondence of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary director with the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District and the Volhynia governor.
Documents on Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary teaching personnel include a staff list; official lists on the work of administrators and teachers, and lists of same for inclusion in annual directories; files on the appointment of the director and honorary trustee of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; on the hiring, transfer, and firing of seminary teachers, awards for their “diligent service,” and seniority promotions; information on the scholarly and literary activities of particular Jewish teachers (I.-G. M.-Sh. Polichinetskii, Kh. G. Lerner, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, Eliezer Zvi Zweifel, Ia. M. Eichenbaum), and their proposals on reforming the educational process and internal procedures of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, particularly the reports of the first inspector of the seminary, Ia. M. Eichenbaum, on ceasing the ceremonial covering of heads during the teaching of Jewish subjects (1858), and of his successor in this office, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, on the harmfulness of age restrictions in the admission of students to the seminary (1866).
A significant number of documents describe the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary student body. These include statistical information on the number of students; lists of students accepted and tested; class logs; progress reports and records; registers of absences and student behaviour, and of the names of students supported by state grants [kazennokoshtnye] and those not [svoekoshtnye] living in the students’ quarters, as well as reports of those in charge of these quarters; data on students’ practice of religious rituals and their extracurricular daily life, including on the activities of the student drama club (which in December 1854 put on a show in Berdichev “to benefit wounded warriors and the families of those killed” in the Crimean War), and on the unsuccessful attempt to publish the lithographic journal School Literary Broadsheet (1868); files on students’ admission to and dismissal from the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, yearly and final examinations, and exemption from conscription requirements; on rabbinical candidates and their assignment to internships in synagogues, and the award of the titles of rabbi and assistant rabbi; on the hiring of graduates as teachers at state Jewish schools and as rabbis, and conflicts arising thereupon (intrigues, bribery of electors in rabbinical elections, etc.); and sermons written and read by rabbinical seminary students in 1866-67.
Another group of files deals with other Jewish structures subordinate to the director of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary. These include files on the transfer to this official’s jurisdiction of the Zhitomir Jewish Publishing House, which was leased to the brothers L., G., and A.-L. Shapiro (1850), and a set of materials pertaining to its activities, including reports and dispatches of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary inspector on the examination of its work, and files on the collection of debts from the merchants Shapiro and on renegotiating contracts for the rental of the publishing house; on the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary inspector’s “censoring” of Jewish books (in connection with the permission granted the seminary 1 July 1862 to freely open publishing houses “for the printing therein exclusively of Jewish books”); a register of books that arrived at the publishing house for printing in 1861-62; correspondence on complaints related to the publishing house’s refusal “to print educational and other useful books” (1857); on the Volhynia province public schools director’s transfer of Jewish educational institutions of the city of Zhitomir to the Volhynia Provincial Jewish School Commission (1867) and on the latter’s issuance of religious and educational literature to melameds and teachers at state Jewish schools (1873); records on the number of melameds and “cheder-keepers,” and lists of same; documents on the opening of the Zhitomir Jewish Trade School (1862) and on changes made in its charter at the demand of the Volhynia governor (1866); on the founding at the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary of a Saturday school “for a Jewish trade class” and on its closing (in connection with the liquidation of Sunday schools operating on the same basis, 1861-62); etc.
There is also correspondence with bookstores and publishers on the purchase of books for the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary’s library, and on rare editions donated to it by Jewish philanthropists, including Barons E. G. and Horace Gunzburg (1857); on donations of funds by Jewish merchants (M. D. Vainshtein, M. Gorovits, I. German, and others) to support poor pupils, and proposals on establishing a stipend for “Jewish young people” from candle tax funds; various individuals’ applications for permission to take qualifying exams for the title of rabbi and state Jewish schoolteacher (including the Berdichev townsperson Sholem Abramovitsh, more commonly known as the writer Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1855), and for permission to open private Jewish courses and boarding schools, with charter documents appended; files on the admission of students on state support, and on revocation of same; on forbidding state-supported students to live in private apartments, and banning secret student circles; on the conclusion of contracts for the rental of Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary facilities, and on the choice of the construction site of its main building (1851); on the acquisition of educational equipment, furniture, clothing, and shoes (cash books, logs of income and expenses, records of appropriations for the maintenance of the school and students’ quarters, etc.); registration logs of incoming and outgoing documents; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
This was opened in November 1847 (along with an analogous seminary in Vil’no) to train rabbis and teachers of state Jewish schools of the first and second class. According to the Statute on Rabbinical Seminaries, it was open to “Jews of whatever status ten years of age or older, having knowledge requisite for this purpose in Jewish as well as general subjects.” For those matriculating from schools of the first class or who had been homeschooled, preparatory classes were established equivalent to the first three high school [gimnaziia] grades; subsequently, at the initiative of the Zhitomir Crown Rabbi L. M. Binshtok, an alumnus of the seminary, it opened (20 December 1861) a Saturday school, taught, along with Binshtok himself, by pupils of the upper grades. The seminary’s curriculum was divided into a general four-year one (corresponding to the four upper grades of a high school [gimnaziia] and two specialized ones: the one-year pedagogical and two-year rabbinical curricula. Rabbinical candidates also had to serve a one-year internship as assistants to rabbis.
The Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary was under the jurisdiction of the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District, and nominations for its director (who could only be a Christian) and for the inspector in charge of overseeing the teaching of Jewish subjects were determined directly by the minister of education. The Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary director was in turn given jurisdiction over a number of Jewish establishments and educational institutions: the Volhynia Provincial Jewish School Commission; Jewish educational institutions of the city of Zhitomir; and the Zhitomir Jewish Publishing House (one of the two permitted at the time in Russia; the other was located in Vil’no; according to the Statute on Jewish Publishing Houses, approved 27 November 1845 by Nicholas I, duties of the directors and inspectors of the rabbinical seminaries included the “closest observation” of the publishing houses’ activities).
Although Jewish subjects were taught at the seminary by such prominent Haskalah figures as A.-B. Gottlober, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, Eliezer Zvi Zweifel, Ia. M. Eichenbaum and others, most students preferred general-education disciplines, which would enable them to enter universities. Only a few of the seminary’s graduates went on to devote themselves to rabbinical activities, and even those who strived to do so typically met with serious opposition from the Jewish community, which looked upon the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary as a “den of unbelief” and accused its students and instructors of violating religious precepts. In the twenty-six years of its existence, the seminary produced ten graduating classes from the pedagogic department and seven from the rabbinical. In 1873, in the course of a reform of state Jewish educational institutions, both rabbinical seminaries (Zhitomir and Vil’no) were reorganised as Jewish teachers’ institutes (on the Zhitomir Jewish Teachers’ Institute, see the information given in the description of f. 354), and ceased their existence as educational institutions training rabbis.
- Access points: locations:
- Berdichev
- Ukraine
- Volhynia province
- Zhitomir
- Subject terms:
- Aid and relief
- Censorship
- Correspondence
- Education--Melamdim
- Education--Student organisations
- Education--Students
- Education--Teachers and professors
- Education--Vocational training
- Financial matters--Debt
- Financial records
- Libraries
- Military
- Personal records
- Publishing
- Rabbis
- Statistics
- Synagogues
- Taxation--Candle tax
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes two inventories systematised chronologically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Reference number:
- F. 396
- Title:
- Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; Zhitomir, Volhynia Province
- Title (official language):
- Житомирское раввинское училище, г. Житомир Волынской губ.; Житомирське рабинське училище, м. Житомир Волинської губ.
- Creator/accumulator:
- Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary
- Date(s):
- 1847/1873
- Language:
- Russian
- Hebrew
- Extent:
- 803 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Included are directives pertaining to the whole period of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary’s activity: the Statute on Rabbinical Seminaries (1847); orders of the Ministry of Education; and circulars and proposals for circulars of the administration and superintendent of the Kiev Educational District, including the order (1873) reorganising the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary as the Jewish Teachers’ Institute beginning with the 1873-74 school year.
Information on the functioning of the seminary and on the nature of its educational process is contained in “Brief notes on the actions and state of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary from 1847 through 1852”; files and correspondence “On the inspection of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary by state school inspector Mogilianskii” (1850), and on the results of a “visitation” [vizitatsiia] of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary by the “learned Jew” M. Rubinshtein on behalf of the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District (1858); instructions for students of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary and rules for pupils living in the general students’ quarters (1862); minute-logs of sessions of the seminary’s academic council; curricula and syllabuses; reports of the director on his work and dispatches to the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District; annual reports and materials on same; “seven-day” reports of the senior inspector on the state of the seminary and its students’ quarters; and correspondence of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary director with the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District and the Volhynia governor.
Documents on Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary teaching personnel include a staff list; official lists on the work of administrators and teachers, and lists of same for inclusion in annual directories; files on the appointment of the director and honorary trustee of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; on the hiring, transfer, and firing of seminary teachers, awards for their “diligent service,” and seniority promotions; information on the scholarly and literary activities of particular Jewish teachers (I.-G. M.-Sh. Polichinetskii, Kh. G. Lerner, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, Eliezer Zvi Zweifel, Ia. M. Eichenbaum), and their proposals on reforming the educational process and internal procedures of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, particularly the reports of the first inspector of the seminary, Ia. M. Eichenbaum, on ceasing the ceremonial covering of heads during the teaching of Jewish subjects (1858), and of his successor in this office, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, on the harmfulness of age restrictions in the admission of students to the seminary (1866).
A significant number of documents describe the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary student body. These include statistical information on the number of students; lists of students accepted and tested; class logs; progress reports and records; registers of absences and student behaviour, and of the names of students supported by state grants [kazennokoshtnye] and those not [svoekoshtnye] living in the students’ quarters, as well as reports of those in charge of these quarters; data on students’ practice of religious rituals and their extracurricular daily life, including on the activities of the student drama club (which in December 1854 put on a show in Berdichev “to benefit wounded warriors and the families of those killed” in the Crimean War), and on the unsuccessful attempt to publish the lithographic journal School Literary Broadsheet (1868); files on students’ admission to and dismissal from the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, yearly and final examinations, and exemption from conscription requirements; on rabbinical candidates and their assignment to internships in synagogues, and the award of the titles of rabbi and assistant rabbi; on the hiring of graduates as teachers at state Jewish schools and as rabbis, and conflicts arising thereupon (intrigues, bribery of electors in rabbinical elections, etc.); and sermons written and read by rabbinical seminary students in 1866-67.
Another group of files deals with other Jewish structures subordinate to the director of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary. These include files on the transfer to this official’s jurisdiction of the Zhitomir Jewish Publishing House, which was leased to the brothers L., G., and A.-L. Shapiro (1850), and a set of materials pertaining to its activities, including reports and dispatches of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary inspector on the examination of its work, and files on the collection of debts from the merchants Shapiro and on renegotiating contracts for the rental of the publishing house; on the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary inspector’s “censoring” of Jewish books (in connection with the permission granted the seminary 1 July 1862 to freely open publishing houses “for the printing therein exclusively of Jewish books”); a register of books that arrived at the publishing house for printing in 1861-62; correspondence on complaints related to the publishing house’s refusal “to print educational and other useful books” (1857); on the Volhynia province public schools director’s transfer of Jewish educational institutions of the city of Zhitomir to the Volhynia Provincial Jewish School Commission (1867) and on the latter’s issuance of religious and educational literature to melameds and teachers at state Jewish schools (1873); records on the number of melameds and “cheder-keepers,” and lists of same; documents on the opening of the Zhitomir Jewish Trade School (1862) and on changes made in its charter at the demand of the Volhynia governor (1866); on the founding at the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary of a Saturday school “for a Jewish trade class” and on its closing (in connection with the liquidation of Sunday schools operating on the same basis, 1861-62); etc.
There is also correspondence with bookstores and publishers on the purchase of books for the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary’s library, and on rare editions donated to it by Jewish philanthropists, including Barons E. G. and Horace Gunzburg (1857); on donations of funds by Jewish merchants (M. D. Vainshtein, M. Gorovits, I. German, and others) to support poor pupils, and proposals on establishing a stipend for “Jewish young people” from candle tax funds; various individuals’ applications for permission to take qualifying exams for the title of rabbi and state Jewish schoolteacher (including the Berdichev townsperson Sholem Abramovitsh, more commonly known as the writer Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 1855), and for permission to open private Jewish courses and boarding schools, with charter documents appended; files on the admission of students on state support, and on revocation of same; on forbidding state-supported students to live in private apartments, and banning secret student circles; on the conclusion of contracts for the rental of Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary facilities, and on the choice of the construction site of its main building (1851); on the acquisition of educational equipment, furniture, clothing, and shoes (cash books, logs of income and expenses, records of appropriations for the maintenance of the school and students’ quarters, etc.); registration logs of incoming and outgoing documents; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
This was opened in November 1847 (along with an analogous seminary in Vil’no) to train rabbis and teachers of state Jewish schools of the first and second class. According to the Statute on Rabbinical Seminaries, it was open to “Jews of whatever status ten years of age or older, having knowledge requisite for this purpose in Jewish as well as general subjects.” For those matriculating from schools of the first class or who had been homeschooled, preparatory classes were established equivalent to the first three high school [gimnaziia] grades; subsequently, at the initiative of the Zhitomir Crown Rabbi L. M. Binshtok, an alumnus of the seminary, it opened (20 December 1861) a Saturday school, taught, along with Binshtok himself, by pupils of the upper grades. The seminary’s curriculum was divided into a general four-year one (corresponding to the four upper grades of a high school [gimnaziia] and two specialized ones: the one-year pedagogical and two-year rabbinical curricula. Rabbinical candidates also had to serve a one-year internship as assistants to rabbis.
The Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary was under the jurisdiction of the superintendent of the Kiev Educational District, and nominations for its director (who could only be a Christian) and for the inspector in charge of overseeing the teaching of Jewish subjects were determined directly by the minister of education. The Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary director was in turn given jurisdiction over a number of Jewish establishments and educational institutions: the Volhynia Provincial Jewish School Commission; Jewish educational institutions of the city of Zhitomir; and the Zhitomir Jewish Publishing House (one of the two permitted at the time in Russia; the other was located in Vil’no; according to the Statute on Jewish Publishing Houses, approved 27 November 1845 by Nicholas I, duties of the directors and inspectors of the rabbinical seminaries included the “closest observation” of the publishing houses’ activities).
Although Jewish subjects were taught at the seminary by such prominent Haskalah figures as A.-B. Gottlober, Kh.-Z. Slonimskii, Eliezer Zvi Zweifel, Ia. M. Eichenbaum and others, most students preferred general-education disciplines, which would enable them to enter universities. Only a few of the seminary’s graduates went on to devote themselves to rabbinical activities, and even those who strived to do so typically met with serious opposition from the Jewish community, which looked upon the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary as a “den of unbelief” and accused its students and instructors of violating religious precepts. In the twenty-six years of its existence, the seminary produced ten graduating classes from the pedagogic department and seven from the rabbinical. In 1873, in the course of a reform of state Jewish educational institutions, both rabbinical seminaries (Zhitomir and Vil’no) were reorganised as Jewish teachers’ institutes (on the Zhitomir Jewish Teachers’ Institute, see the information given in the description of f. 354), and ceased their existence as educational institutions training rabbis.
- Access points: locations:
- Berdichev
- Ukraine
- Volhynia province
- Zhitomir
- Subject terms:
- Aid and relief
- Censorship
- Correspondence
- Education--Melamdim
- Education--Student organisations
- Education--Students
- Education--Teachers and professors
- Education--Vocational training
- Financial matters--Debt
- Financial records
- Libraries
- Military
- Personal records
- Publishing
- Rabbis
- Statistics
- Synagogues
- Taxation--Candle tax
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes two inventories systematised chronologically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
