Parents Historical Context
Kheyder
Before World War I, the kheyder was the most common type of elementary school for Jewish boys. A dawn-to-dusk religious primary school. All boys attended kheyder. If their family couldn’t afford it, the community would pay for them.
In the first level, little boys learned the Hebrew alphabet and reading skills. They read the prayer book and the weekly Torah portion, and translated it into Yiddish equivalents (the Torah are the first five books of Moses found in the Old Testament). The next level was to read the Torah with the commentary of the famous Rabbi Rashi. Once all kheyder levels were completed, gifted boys would go on to the study of the Talmud at a Yeshiva. Not all boys were as bright as their peers, nor many could afford to attend a Yeshiva, so their religious education ended when they were around 13 years old. They could go on to secular schools or stop studying altogether.
The Yehudia was a modern Jewish school. Girls there learned Hebrew and other subjects. What made this type of education possible for girls was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment movement. It was a late nineteenth century movement that wanted to modernize Jewish society. The fact that Malke Epstein received this type of education was unusual. In the year she was born, the Russian census showed that 60% of Jewish women in their 30s were illiterate (even in Yiddish!) and 82% could not read or write Russian. Malke could do both. The Haskalah, and mandatory education in Poland after independence, opened the doors of education for the next generations of Jewish women.
World War I took place between 1914-1918. It involved many countries around the world in a conflict of unprecedented destruction and slaughter. The war started with the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in 1914. Princip had hoped to liberate the region from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
The Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria) fought against the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, and other countries). Roughly half a million Jews fought in the Russian military during the course of the war. More than half of these were volunteers. The fighting between Russia and the German and Austro-Hungarian empires took place mostly in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland (At the time, Poland was divided and occupied by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian Empires. Congress Poland was a region created by the Russian Empire, within their area of occupation, to placate the desire for a Polish nation. It was an independent and semi-constitutional state). That was the heartland of East European Jewry, home to over 4 million Jews. During spring and summer of 1915 Germany took control of Lithuania, Latvia and all areas of Poland in the Russian Empire, as well as parts of Volhynia and Belorussia. That meant around 40% of the Russian Empire’s Jews were under the rule of the Central Powers during World War I. Vilna was under German occupation. After the war Poland became an independent republic in 1918, and Vilna was incorporated by Poland in 1922. The war ended the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, led to the Russian Revolutions, and destabilized European society and economy.
Many factors combined to bring about events that would change the world forever. This included years of unrest by workers and peasants, activism by anti-tsarist political movements, food shortages, a weak economy, dissatisfaction over corruption in the government, and catastrophic losses suffered by the Russian Army.
In 1917, when Russia was still fighting in World War I, it underwent two revolutions that resulted in the end of imperial Russia.
The first revolution occurred in February. It put a temporary government in place, but it almost immediately faced a challenge from more radical “soviets” (workers’ and soldiers’ councils), especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The soviets were increasingly under the influence of the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin. By October 24, the start of the second revolution, they were strong enough to overthrow the temporary government. This led to over 70 years of Communist rule. The Bolsheviks soon took complete control. By 1922, “Russia” was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union).
For the first time since they had been admitted to the Russian Empire, Jews gained full civic equality. However, Jewish religious life was repressed, and all separate Jewish political movements were outlawed by 1921. Nonetheless, some Jews enthusiastically embraced communism and attained high positions in the Communist Party. Only a small minority of Jews ever fully embraced communism. But because these few Jews rose to prominence in the party, there was eventually a widespread belief that all Jews were to blame for communism.