Jozsef Faludi and his brother Imre Fogler in an elementary school class photo

My brother Imre and me in a class photo at the end of the first or second grade. I went to school in Kiskoros, where there was a Jewish school. The boys and girls went together. There were only two classes, younger kids in one and older kids in the other. My sisters went to middle school, like us boys. They finished the four grades, and then they learned the trade from our mother, helping her. In their free time they went to a Jewish house where young people would get together and do cultural things, and play sports. Kiskoros was an Orthodox community. We all had payot (sidelocks), that we stuck behind our ears. Later, when we got into the yeshiva, we wore our payot out. I was a clever kid, I never did what you?d call homework. What I knew was what they?d explain to us in class. Regular school was something new for us, because we learned with entirely different methods, and completely different things than in the cheder(Jewish religious primary school). We had school lessons in the morning, and then we stayed until 6 in the evening with the melamed (Jewish religious primary school teacher), who taught us our alefbeys (Hebrew ABC), and the Torah, and we learned the Rashi commentaries too. The cheder was a separate place next to the so-called little synagogue, and only boys went. We went to the melamed when we were 3 years old. At first we learned to read, but we didn't know what the words meant. Then when we started learning the Torah, we translated it into Yiddish.

Photos from this interviewee