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5423972_5_1449.xml
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5423972_5_1449.xml
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<bibl><title>Daily Jewish Courier</title>,
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<title level="a">A Reply to Ger Ve-Toshav</title></bibl>
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<publisher>The Newberry Library</publisher>
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<note>Transcribed from digital images contributed to the Internet
Archive by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.</note>
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<title level="a">A REPLY TO GER VE-TOSHAV</title></bibl>
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<p>Dear Sir: I hope that you will permit me to reply, through your newspaper, to Mr. Ger Ve-toshav [a stranger but a resident; herein used as a nom de plume] whose letter, printed in the Courier on Tuesday, January 3, contained some "important observations" about the Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah, in order "to point out its faults and to help to remove them".</p>
<p>"As a frequent visitor," as you, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, call yourself, "to the above-mentioned Talmud Torah, and as a Jew to whom the Torah and Judaism are dear", you, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav should have first revealed your "important observations" to the management of the Talmud Torah, or to its instructors before you "felt it my duty to come before the public" with an open letter, under a pen name. But nobody in the Talmud Torah knows of anybody who is a frequent visitor there and has ever made such remarks.</p>
<p>The faults of the Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah, as you, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, point out, are, according to your statement, as follows: "not a single word <pb facs="5423972_5_1450.jpg" n="2"/>of Hebrew" is taught there except the Pentateuch and the Prophets (which are not Hebrew, in your opinion). These are translated into Yiddish (the Lord save us!), "a language which the children do not know because American children speak only English". (Don't they speak Hebrew?) "No history or folk lore is taught there" (well, here you guessed wrong), "no Hebrew literature is taught" (?!), "no attention at all is paid to education." What education? At once, you explain: "the child is not introduced to Zionist tendencies". In short, "it smells of the old-fashioned school". You arrive at the conclusion that to enable the Jewish-American child to learn all those subjects, we should, once and for all, discard translations. No translations! Out with translations! In the Hebrew school, we should teach him to speak Hebrew (how long will it take?), and then we would not need to do any more translating! We should teach, not translate! To put the matter briefly; "they should install a system of teaching Ivrith Be-Ivrith [Hebrew subject matter explained in Hebrew]" (so that is what has been troubling you).</p>
<p>Mr. Ger Ve-toshav! I will not deny, my dear friend, that your system of Ivrith Be-Ivrith will teach the Jewish-American child to speak a good Hebrew, <pb facs="5423972_5_1451.jpg" n="3"/>in a very short time, and when he stops attending your Ivrith Be-Ivrith school, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he will be a thorough Hebraist, who will speak a perfect Hebrew, and will know the old and the modern Hebrew literature from Yehuda Ha-Levi to Dr. Erter, Mapo, Smolenskin, Ahad Ha-am, Bialik, and Shneur; he will know the whole Torah, he will know the history of the Jews as related by the historians Graetz and Dubnow, he will know the folk tales, biblical and modern, he will be able to read At The Crossroads, without a commentary (except the Pentateuch, which is not Hebrew). In short, he will be a perfect "scientific" Hebraist and Zionist, but he will not be able to read a simple prayer, such as "Blessed be the One Who said". So what? It does not matter. This prayer is an old one, anyway, and it was taught in the old-fashioned schools.</p>
<p>It is not my purpose, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, to criticize. I do not go out of my way to look for faults; I do not feel myself "compelled to come before the public", but I want to call your attention to one thing. Once and for all, we must recognize the fact that as long as we, in America, have strict, <pb facs="5423972_5_1452.jpg" n="4"/>Orthodox, synagogue Jews, who maintain the Jewish traditions and do not speak any other language except Yiddish; as long as the American-Jewish press--which brings us Jewish news, and everything about the Jews in which we are interested, their achievements, their ambitions--is printed in Yiddish; as long as the rabbis, preachers and speakers of our Orthodox synagogues deliver their speeches in Yiddish; as long as the parents wish their children to preserve their Judaism and not to become estranged from them; as long as parents and children strive to understand one another so that they won't feel themselves to be strangers--just so long will the Pentateuch, and only the Pentateuch, with a Yiddish translation, be taught in our Talmud Torah, which was founded and is being maintained by Orthodox Jews. Do you know why? It is because in the Pentateuch, one is told to eat only kosher food; thus the child will understand why his father is so interested in the observance of the dietary laws; because in the Pentateuch, he will also learn of many other commands, such as observing the Sabbath, giving charity, fearing God, doing justice, refraining from gossip, and so on; because in the Pentateuch, Zion, and love for the land of Zion, are often specifically mentioned. The Pentateuch will help the child to understand all the Jewish traditions, and that is what the Orthodox Jews call <pb facs="5423972_5_1453.jpg" n="5"/>a Jewish education. If they should postpone the teaching of the Pentateuch until the child knew Hebrew, and only then taught him the Pentateuch, without translating it, they could be sure that such a time would never come. The Orthodox Jews are certain that when the child graduates from the Talmud Torah he will know Hebrew, history, folk lore, literature, just as well as the child who graduated from a Ivrith Be-Ivrith Talmud Torah, and he will be just as nationalistically inclined, as concerns Zionism, as the other child.</p>
<p>Regarding the great catastrophe which, unfortunately, took place when you were present at the Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah, when a pupil mistranslated the Hebrew word Sholem as freedom instead of peace, I would advise you, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, not to worry too much about it, because you mustn't forget that the Book of Genesis is taught only in the first grade. By the time the student reaches the Book of Deuteronomy, he will have come across the word Sholem many times, and he will know, by that time, that it means peace. If the child does not know Yiddish when he enters the Talmud Torah, he certainly knows it by the time he graduates.</p>
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<p>By the way, you ought to know that a Talmud Torah, under any system, may sometimes have an instructor who is not a great scholar, or one who is negligent; neither the management nor the system should be blamed for this condition.</p>
<p>Anyway, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, let us come out in the open. I will make you a proposition: come to the Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah and I will have a surprise for you. I will introduce you to several children, who, up to a short time ago, studied in a different Talmud Torah. Some have studied three, some, four and some, even five years. These children are very capable (one, who studied there for four years, is fourteen years old, and is in the second year of high school). Those children are the worst in our whole class, so far as understanding a sentence from the Pentateuch, or any sentence in Hebrew, in speaking Hebrew, or even in reading a simple prayer like "Blessed be the One Who said", is concerned. The only good thing about them is that they never studied the Pentateuch and cannot speak Yiddish. Do you know from which Talmud Torah they came to us? They came from one of the best and most popular Ivrith Be-Ivrith Talmud Torahs in Chicago. When I say that they cannot speak Yiddish, I do not mean to imply that they speak Hebrew. Oh, no! But to tell <pb facs="5423972_5_1455.jpg" n="7"/>the truth, they do speak a good English. This is not the first time that such children have been brought to us, for us to "improve".</p>
<p>If you meet the children who had the "misfortune" to be trained in the old-fashioned Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah, you will find that they know the various books of the Pentateuch well, that they understand thoroughly chapters from the Prophets, that they know grammar and speak a good Yiddish. We hope that in Palestine, they will speak Hebrew as well as anybody else does, just as you, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, probably speak English as well as anybody else does.</p>
<p>I hope, Mr. Ger Ve-toshav, that you will accept my invitation (you will be welcome any time the Talmud Torah is open). I believe that you, yourself, will then admit that as far as Jewish education in America is concerned, you are more of a Ger than a Toshov. [Translator's note: This is a play on words. Ger means alien, Toshov means resident.]</p>
<p>N. S. Herman, principal instructor of the Grenshaw Street Talmud Torah.</p>
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