Zionist library for boys and girls · 1908-01-01 · 5 · p. Seite 1

-1- PERET2 SMOLENSK!!. ■ Peretz Smolensliin was born in the year 1841, in the small Russian town Monastrychina, that is, at a time when the Haskala movement was in full progress. He was brought up in thecheder, as were most of the Jevjish children at that time. He saw with his own eyes the poverty of the ghetto and the superstition which prevailed amongst the Jews there, which was a cause of their ignorance and narrowness of mind. The ghetto did not enable the Jews to enlarge their scope of mind, and the Rabbis who taught the children in the Yeshivot and the cheder were afraid of any kind of "western" influence on their pupils, by which they meant the learning of things other than the Bible and Jewish law and legends. The Rabbis and most of the older generation were therefore very much against the ideas of the Haskala movement. They were afraid that these new ideas would take the Youth, and eventually the whole new generation away from the true path of Judaism. To be a "Maskil" - teacher of the Haskala movement, was therefore not