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"Every child attended kheyder from the early age
of three or four, sometimes five. Here he learned to
read Hebrew and absorbed the images, stories, places,
and characters from the heroic past of his people,
which served as the basic myth of Jewish society."
—Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish
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In the beginning...was the kheyder.
A new exhibition open March 2008
In conjunction with our exhibit, The People's Book: The Bible in the Jewish Imagination, we're also featuring a new exhibit on the kheyder.
The kheyder curriculum remained essentially the same from the sixteenth century until the Second World War. In these small rooms (kheyder means "room") every Jewish boy - and sometimes girls - learned how to read the Hebrew Bible.
Children learned the Bible by laboriously translating each Hebrew word into Yiddish. This process, known as taytshn, infused the Yiddish language with countless biblical quotes, jokes and allusions. As a result, every Yiddish speaker relies on centuries of biblical interpretation to communicate. Equally important, modern Yiddish writers and readers acquired their literary language, rich in moral teaching and symbolism, in kheyder.
Yiddish writers sometimes recalled kheyder as a warm, stimulating environment, while others remembered the beatings, teasing, and pedagogic incompetence.
This new exhibit, curated by our Collection Manager Aaron Rubinstein, explores the spaces, people, and practices of kheyder through text, literature, and images. While visiting be sure to check out the plethora of primers in our Yiddish book collection used in Jewish schools to teach Yiddish. The primers range from turn-of-the-century America to the 1980s.
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