Vasile Grunea's certificate of finishing the Cultura Jewish Theoretical Lyceum

From early 1945 to the summer of the same year I was a private student at the Jewish Theoretical Lyceum for Boys in Bucharest called Cultura B - this school was the equivalent of the Tarbut in Kolozsvar. We usually took private exams once a month. The certificate is made out to Ladislau Gruber, as I was called then, and it confirms that I finished the 8th grade of the lyceum and can take the final examination. We went to the four-grade elementary school and then to the eight-grade secondary school, so we went to elementary school from the age of 7 to 12 and to lyceum from 12 to 19. Finishing the 8th grade entitled you to take the final examination, after which you could go to university. The Cultura was a very famous school, where famous Jewish teachers, who had been expelled from university education in 1940, taught. Among the teachers was Graur, who became one of the most famous linguistics professor in Romania, Professor Bick, teacher of Romanian language, Sufrin, the history teacher, and Mihail Sebastian, who was one of the best dramatists of the interwar period, whose memoirs, which appeared three years ago [in 2000], kicked up dust. The classes were numbered, there was Cultura A and Cultura B, but there was no difference between them, they simply had to have this because the school was so big. Cultura A had classes from 1st to 8th grade, just as Cultura B, they just didn't have enough rooms and the teaching was done in two buildings. According to the educational law of the time, which was called Voitec Law, after the Minister of Education at the time, there were permanent open private examinations, so one could finish several grades in one year and one could take an exam every month. I finished four grades in 1945. We took many exams but we had been studying the material for years as private pupils and we just did revisions for a month before the exams. That's how I managed to graduate from four classes in one year, so to speak; however, the exam didn't take place in the Jewish school but there was a graduation committee. As far as I remember, I took the exam in the Spiru Haret Lyceum, where the president of the committee was university professor of philosophy and poet Alexandru Clausian. We all passed the graduation exam although not with very high grades.

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