OPE (Society for Promotion of Culture Among Jews in Russia)

The Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia (OPE, Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii) was established in St. Petersburg in 1863 by a group of Jewish philanthropists led by Evzel’ Gintsburg with the primary goal of “enlightening” Russia’s Jews and giving them the tools to integrate more fully into Russian civic life. By the 1890s, the society had found its most important role: providing monetary support, teacher training, and pedagogical and methodological guidance to the rapidly expanding universe of modern Russian-language private schools for Jewish boys and girls and to associated institutions of mass modernization, like the hundreds of small Jewish libraries founded by local reformers across the Pale of Settlement and Russian Poland. In the years before World War I, the ope’s rank and file was increasingly dominated by young intellectuals and activist inclined toward Zionist and nationalist or socialist ideas, and thus to Hebraism or Yiddishism. During World War I, the ope provided essential support for the creation of dozens of modern Jewish schools serving thousands of Jewish children displaced as refugees by the war; but ironically, those schools were largely founded and shaped by teachers committed either to Hebraist or Yiddishist national ideals, and the ope essentially evaporated by 1917 as its activist-teacher base split along Hebraist versus Yiddishist lines. The society was suppressed and eventually dissolved by the Bolsheviks in 1929.