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Updated: June 5, 2025
In another novel, "The Joy of the Hypocrite," which appeared in Vienna, in 1872, Smolenskin extols the idealism of his hero Simon, a product of the Yeshibah: "Who had implanted in the mind of Simon the ideal of justice and the sublime word? Who had kindled in his soul the sacred flame, love of truth and research? Verily, he had found all these in the Yeshibah.
My father distinguished himself for scholarship from the first. Five years old when he entered heder, at eleven he was already a yeshibah bahur a student in the seminary. The rebbe never had occasion to use the birch on him. On the contrary, he held him up as an example to the dull or lazy pupils, praised him in the village, and carried his fame to Polotzk.
In a series of photographic pictures, Smolenskin reproduces in detail the ways and exploits of all the bohemians of the ghetto, from the beggars up to the peripatetic cantors, their moral shortcomings, their spitefulness, and their insolence. Impelled by the wish to acquire an education, and perhaps also put a roof over his head, Joseph finally enters a celebrated Yeshibah.
At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed , to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah.
Joseph forfeited the privilege of sanctuary residing in the Yeshibah on the day he was taken redhanded, in the act of reading a profane book. Religious fanaticism had never proceeded with so much rigor as during the reign of terror following upon the disorganization of the social life of the Jews by the authorities, and the triumphant assertion of arbitrary power.
Frequently it is at the Yeshibah that the young man for the first time finds sincere friends for whom he forms a lasting attachment, and they become his trusted advisers.
Such was the lot of the juvenile cantonists. Youths, who had no knowledge of the Russian language, were torn away from the heder or yeshibah, often from wife and children. In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most youths at the age of eighteen were married.
His pupils followed his example; they translated several scientific works into Hebrew, and founded schools and centres of puritanism, not only in Lithuania, but also as far away as Palestine. From this time on the Yeshibah of Wolosin became the chief seat of traditional Talmud study and Rabbinic rationalism.
These many days, since they themselves were entered as new pupils in the school, they had not heard such gentle words issue from the mouth of the teacher...." This odd school prepared the child of the ghetto in very deed for the life and the struggle for existence awaiting him. In the next higher school, the Yeshibah, the alma mater of the Rabbinical student, the happenings were no less curious.
Underlying their superstitions, crudities, and absurdities is the "prophetic consciousness," of which they have never been entirely divested. The heder is indeed far from what a school should be, and the yeshibah is hardly to be tolerated in a civilized community; yet what spiritual feasts, what noble endeavors, and what unselfish devotion are witnessed within their dingy walls!
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