Meeting Notes: On Implementing a Full Hebrew Curriculum
Jaffa School Board
1896
23 Tevet 5656
This week we took a great step forward in the history of the national Hebrew school. From this day on, all subjects in the school in Jaffa will be studied in Hebrew. It is needless for us to say that many opposed this improvement. Even those who sided with this reform were seemingly afraid to take upon themselves full responsibility for this. In fact, whose heart would not tremble when he sees the great poverty prevalent in the textbooks in our language. We do not have even one good textbook in our language. Whatever the case, we need to know that in the Hebrew school that is under the patronage of the Alliance [Israélite Universelle]—this is the ministry for educating our people in the lands of the Orient—a great reform has been made in the national sense from which there will result great changes and improvements in the education of our people. We now have to endeavor with all of our strength to ensure that this first attempt will be successful. One of the greatest obstacles for our successful reform is, as we have said earlier, the lack of Hebrew textbooks. Therefore, we decided at a meeting of our brethren on 23 Tevet:
- To establish a six-person committee to arouse our best benefactors to aid our publication of academic textbooks in our language.
- To start this project once we have 5,000 francs available to us.
- Once we have the above sum, to nominate a group of expert scholars who will oversee the textbook project.
- To write especially to Mr. Wissotzky1 about this matter.
In that meeting there were elected to the committee:
Dr. Jaffe, 2 Eisenstadt, 3 Kaiserman,4 Niego,5 Behar,6 Angel,7 [and] Margolis-Kalvarisky8
Notes
[Kalonymus Ze’ev Wissotzky (1824–1904), tea magnate and philanthropist who contributed to Zionist and Jewish educational projects in Palestine and Europe.—Eds.]
[Hillel Jaffe (1864–1936), a pioneering medical doctor and Zionist leader in Palestine.—Eds.]
[Yehoshua Barzilai Eisenstadt (1855–1918), Zionist leader and writer who served as secretary of the Ḥovevei Tsiyon executive committee in Jaffa.—Eds.]
[Nathan Kaiserman (1863–1945), an agronomist, banker, and Zionist activist.—Eds.]
[Joseph Niego (1863–1945), a Sephardic agronomist from Ottoman Edirne active in the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), who was then the principal of the Mikveh Israel school.—Eds.]
[Nissim Behar (1848–1931), Jerusalem-born Sephardic educator who championed ‘Ivrit be-‘ivrit (Hebrew in Hebrew) educational pedagogy and was then the principal of the Torah u-Melakhah school in Jerusalem.—Eds.]
[Meir/Meyer Angel (dates unknown), director of the Alliance school in Jaffa, who later worked in Beirut and Algeria.—Eds.]
[Ḥayim Margolis Kalvarisky (1868–1947), a Zionist agronomist who worked for the JCA in the Galilee.—Eds.
Credits
Jaffa School Board, Meeting Notes: On Implementing a Full Hebrew Curriculum, republished in Rachel Elboim-Dror, ed., Ha-ḥinukh ha-‘ivri be-erets Yisra’el, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yitzhak Ben Zvi Institute, 1986), p. 138.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
