Historical Background and Interviews
I. Ludvipol: A Modem Shtetl Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
of harvesting grains in Israel, with a prayer and principle, such as chesed (grace, love) or g’vurah (respect, severity) for each day. People would focus on these principles during prayers and try to put them into practice as they went about their daily lives. For four weeks, joyous activities were curtailed, but they resumed on the thirty-third day, the holiday of Lag b’Omer. On Shavuot, some people stayed up all night discussing reli- gious texts, dairy foods were eaten, and children wore white. “In sum,” said Katz, “the Jewish holidays in Ludvipol were complete. Perfect. And nothing was missing. We did everything.” Then, as now, there were differing viewpoints about the impor - tance of observance and the meaning of holiness. To illustrate this, Katz told a version of a familiar Hasidic story, claiming that it took place in Ludvipol. “One time, all the people came for Kol Nidre, and the rabbi didn’t start the prayers. The people wondered why he didn’t start the prayers. Then a poor boy came in and whistled loudly. At that moment, the rabbi said, ‘Now, we can start. He has opened the gates to God.’ This boy was an orphan and had been raised in a vil- lage of gentiles. Realizing he was a Jew, some Jewish people had encouraged him to come to shul, but the boy did not know how to behave, so he whistled. Although he did not know the proper way to do things, he was completely sincere, with his entire heart.” The Zionist Dream For hundreds of years prior to the opening of Tarbut Schools, Jewish boys in Eastern Europe started their studies at the age of three in a cheder (room, in Yiddish), which depended on the personality and viewpoint of its individual rabbi or melamed (teacher, in Yiddish). The teacher sat at a table, surrounded by his young students, and read aloud from the Torah, first in Hebrew and then in Yiddish. In unison, the boys would repeat what he said, word-for-word. It is a common saying that the main teaching aids at the cheders were the teitl (wooden pointer, in Yiddish), with which the melamed pointed
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