Letter on Education

With the grace of God, Friday, before the Shabbat of the reading of Noah, 5672 [1911].

To our fellow Hasidim (in the city of Turov),

My stomach turned and my ears burned on hearing the terrible news that a vile thing was done among the Jews, through the founding in their city of a municipal school, and that all our fellows [Hasidim] signed a request to establish this school, and several individuals who call themselves Hasidim were the first to hand over their sons to Molech.¹ Shame covers our faces; we tell the mountains to cover us and the hills to fall on us. Who could believe the news that an entire congregation raised in the lap of Judaism and Hasidism remained silent and acted as if they were unaware, and did not even see fit to inform me of such a matter, on which the very existence of Judaism depends, as we have seen lately that it ultimately means conversion [to Christianity], God forbid? This has spread like a plague among the Jewish people, among all those youths who attend school, who after having wasted the best days of their youth and suffered the humiliations of the percentage-norm [of admission to public schools], the bowings, flatteries, and kissing of the feet of any powerful person, which any gentle soul should abhor, ultimately they reach the final stage of the high schools and university, only to find the door closed to them, and then they convert, God forbid, to the religion of the authorities or become anarchists, not wishing to return to Judaism, to which they have become unaccustomed after spending all their time among strangers. By then they have already forgotten it, and even their fathers are ashamed of it. So, from afar I urge those lost and outcast ones: Return, ye backsliding children (Jeremiah 3:22), return and live. Have mercy on the souls of your sons and save them from total annihilation. Educate them in the path of traditional Judaism, for which our ancestors gave their lives and had their blood spilled like water, and which they did not sell for a lentil stew.² Only this Judaism has protected us throughout our exile, lest we be lost like all the nations of which no memory remains. And then shall the Lord God of Israel forgive you for the betrayal you committed against Him and His Torah. And if you decline and disobey, know that we have nothing in common with you, for you are not with us but with our enemies.

May the Lord find us worthy and help us and our sons to follow in the ways of our holy ancestors and to walk in them.