Yeḥiel Heilprin

Yeḥiel Heilprin was a teacher, writer of children’s stories and poetry, and pioneering theorist and pedagogue of Hebrew-language nursery school education. Born in Pryluky in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) to a family of Chabad rabbis, Heilprin received a traditional religious education. Attracted to the Haskalah, he taught himself secular subjects and came to be a devoted Hebraist. Heilprin moved to Warsaw, where he met Pnina Hochberg, his life partner. In 1909, the pair opened the first Hebrew kindergarten outside Palestine. A year later, the Heilprins opened a seminary for kindergarten teachers where they trained a cadre of young women in progressive early childhood pedagogies associated with Froebel and Montessori. Taking refuge in Odessa during World War I, he opened a similar school. In Odessa in 1918, Heilprin founded Ha-Ginah (The Garden), a journal devoted to questions of theory, method, and curriculum for the burgeoning Hebrew school movement across Eastern Europe and Palestine. He renewed publication of Ha-Ginah after his arrival in Mandatory Palestine in 1920. In Palestine’s emerging Jewish Yishuv, Heilprin served as the chief inspector of Hebrew kindergartens, and in 1933 he established a Tel Aviv seminary for kindergarten teachers. His children’s songs remain very popular in Israel.