Historical Background and Interviews
I. Ludvipol: A Modem Shtetl Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
without it.” This situation was not unique to Ludvipol. Leon Rubinstein, who attended a local Polish school in Koretz and was tutored at home in Hebrew, remembered being made to stand while the Pol- ish and Ukrainian students made the sign of the cross. “There were probably only six of us Jews there, and they looked at us like we were strangers,” he said. Because Jewish students were treated poorly at Polish schools in general, many Jewish families stopped sending their children to them during the early 1930s. With Zionism sweeping through East- ern Europe, the institutional anti-Semitism of the Polish schools, and the traditional priority given to education by Jews, it was not long before the new Zionist school movements, Tarbut and Yavneh, became very popular. In addition to their high standards, they pre- pared young people for aliyah. Before long, about one-third of all Jewish students in Poland attended one of these schools. The per- centage was even higher in Volhynia, with more than two-thirds of Jewish students attending the new schools. The first Hebrew kindergarten in Ludvipol was established in 1927 by Chaia Zamir, who grew up in the nearby town of Mezri- chi and studied in Rovno. She taught the children Hebrew, using songs that emphasized Jews’ long-held dreams of reestablishing a homeland. Only a few of these children survived the Holocaust, but Zamir survived and immigrated to Israel. The Tarbut School began a few years later, meeting at first in lo - cal homes, with three teachers and two grades. Soon, young gradu- ates of the teachers’ college in Vilna joined the staff. Ludvipol and other Jewish communities in the area, large and small, cooperated to establish the school. Within a veiy short time, the school offered seven grades and almost all of the Jewish students in Ludvipol and the nearby villages attended it. The school graduated four classes during its nine years of existence. Tarbut became the center of cultural life for both children and adults, who took classes on Saturdays. There were parties for the community on Jewish and Polish holidays. Numerous fund-raising very
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