#cheder

Photo: Leonard Freed via the Jewish Museum

Cornell Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

Henry Roth: Call It Sleep (1934)

Collection items of the week:  two very different 20th century watercolor depictions of heder.  Samuel Rothbort’s (1882-1971) horrified teacher finds his class drawing portraits of him.  Albert Dov Sigal’s (1912-1970) teacher smilingly interacts with his studious young charges.

Born in 1897 to an affluent Russian Jewish family, Vishniac immigrated to Berlin in 1920 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. As an amateur photographer, he took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and ’30s, offering astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimented with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. Documenting the rise of Nazi power, he focused his lens on the signs of oppression and doom that soon formed the backdrop of his Berlin street photography. From ca. 1935 to 1938, while living in Berlin and pursuing his lifelong interests in zoology, biology and science photography, he was commissioned by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the world’s largest Jewish relief organization, to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe. On New Year’s Eve, 1940, he arrived in New York and soon opened a portrait studio. At the same time, he began documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life and established himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe and documented Jewish Displaced Persons camps and the ruins of Berlin. During this time, he also recorded the efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives, and the work of the JDC and other Jewish relief organizations in providing them with aid and emigration assistance.   (source)

Students and teachers of a cheder, Sędziszów, Poland, 1935. The scene was filmed outdoors because the camera used was not capable of filming interiors without additional lighting. (Film commissioned by the town's landsmanshaft organisation in America, produced by member Sidney Herbst during a visit to his hometown.) (YIVO)

Cheder students and teachers coming out of the synagogue, Kolbuszowa (Kolbishev), a town in southeastern Poland, 1930. Film commissioned by the town's landsmanshaft organisations in America. (YIVO)