rejection 503
elsewhere in Lithuania, new yeshivot which established their own dis-
tinctive learning traditions and curricula. Thus in 1897 the yeshivah in
Slobodka, a suburb of Kovno (modern Kaunas), had some 200 students.
The yeshivah founded in the town of Tels in 1875 set up a novel struc-
ture of four classes based on achievement so that good students could
progress to a higher level. The aim of such educational reform was purely
to enhance learning, since none of these yeshivot saw study primarily
as a route to an examination or certificate of competence, although in
practice many who graduated from the yeshivah became communal rab-
bis. The point was to preserve and study the tradition for its own sake.
In the 1940s the defiance of students from the yeshivah in Mir in the face
of the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, when they found refuge from
Nazism after fleeing to Japan through Siberia, was expressed by reprint-
ing classic Jewish texts in Shanghai so that learning should not cease.
For the founders of yeshivot in eastern Europe in the nineteenth cen-
tury the threat of the Enlightenment was far more distant than in Germany
and Hungary. The more immediate challenge was to garner support in the
wider Jewish community for a lifestyle which might all too easily seem to
reserve real religious experience to an elite intellectual class in contrast to
the mass appeal of Hasidism. Among the most effective responses was the
Musar (‘Ethics’) movement within the Lithuanian academies initiated in
Vilna by Yisrael Salanter, who combined his work as head of a yeshivah
engaged in traditional studies with a role as sermonizer in instilling ethi-
cal conduct among ordinary lay Jews as much as among his students.
Many of his educational techniques in the use of pietistic homilies were
adopted in other Lithuanian yeshivot, as well in the wider Jewish world.^8
By the time that Salanter founded his own distinctively Musar-
focused yeshivah in Kovno in 1848, the threat of Hasidism to yeshivah
studies had in fact much receded since the height of the struggle by the
mitnagdim in the late eighteenth century under the leadership of the
Vilna Gaon (see Chapter 15). When the organization of Mahzikey
haDas was founded in Cracow in 1879 to combat the inroads of mod-
ernism in Galicia, it could count on mass support from Belz hasidim
against a common foe. The opposition of the hasidim to the Enlighten-
ment was more a reaction to the hostility of the leaders of the Jewish
modernizers, the maskilim, than intrinsic to the nature of Hasidism
itself. The maskilim blamed Hasidism for preventing a move of Polish
Jews into western- style education to improve their position in society by
offering a superstitious alternative. Hasidic leaders like Menachem
Mendel Schneerson, a grandson of the founder of the Habad movement