https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviet-jewish-schools-yeshiva-yevsektzia-schneersohn-yaffed-antisemitism-first-amendment-11630613080?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Mr. Margolin is a senior editor at Chabad.org.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks launched a harsh war on religious education throughout the Soviet Union, with devastating consequences for Judaism. To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, Soviet attacks on traditional Jewish schools, known as cheders or yeshivas, were led by the Yevsektzia, the militant Jewish sections of the Communist Party, whose members were often more ideologically zealous than their gentile counterparts. In an effort to win Jewish hearts and minds, in January 1921 the Yevsektzia organized a particularly grotesque episode called the Trial of the Cheder.
Held in Vitebsk, the six-day show trial was similar to the medieval disputations with which Jews had contended for centuries. “Experts” on education and hygiene testified that the cheder was backward and dirty. The spectacle quickly devolved into a blatant attack on Judaism.
Despite a valiant defense by Vitebsk’s Jewish community, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Every cheder in Vitebsk was ordered to close. In the early 1920s, more than 1,000 cheders were closed in the U.S.S.R.
My grandfather’s Jewish education was terminated at a second-grade level by this crackdown. Born in Ukraine in 1920, my great-grandparents wanted him to receive authentic Jewish schooling. Even as communism destroyed their world, they persisted and sent their young son to a cheder.
“I barely got past alef beis”—the Hebrew alphabet—“and it was closed,” my grandfather told me shortly before his death last spring at 100. “Some teachers were arrested or shot, others scared away. Before long it was all gone.”
