Tag #114452 - Interview #92415 (Boris Lerman)

All of my siblings and I finished Jewish school and we all also studied in cheder – actually, all of them but me. By the time I started my education, the cheders were already closed. [In 1918 Soviet authorities permitted national minorities to teach their children at schools in their mother tongue. But in 1938 they issued an edict ordering to teach all schoolchildren in Russian.] To clarify, Cheder literally means ‘a room’ in Hebrew. In the context of education, a cheder is a room where children gather to study Hebrew and Torah.