Tag #151785 - Interview #84041 (Yacob Hollander)

At the age of 5 I went to cheder. There were about 10 cheders in Kamyanske: for Hasidic children, for wealthier and poorer families. There were cheder schools for girls where they learned to read and write in Yiddish, studied the Hebrew alphabet and prayers. Every Jewish woman was to know prayers and be able to read them. They didn’t learn to translate prayers from Hebrew into Yiddish and they didn’t understand what they were reading.

Of course, my parents weren’t rich and I went to a middle class cheder. There was a melamed in each class. There were 15 boys in my class. We started studying the alphabet and then in the 2nd grade we started reading prayers. In the 3rd grade we were reading Torah and translated into Yiddish what we read. In the 4th grade we started to have discussions on the Torah. Melamed was paid for his work. Every day he came to one of his pupils to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with the family. There was a ‘stick’ order in cheder. Melameds had bamboo sticks and if a melamed thought that a pupil hadn’t done his homework, he put him on his lap and hit him on his back as many times as he thought proper. It didn’t make sense to argue with him. If one of us did, the rebe complained to parents and then the boy got his portion from his father at home for daring to argue with the rebe. Classes started at 7 am. My mother woke me up at 6. It was dark in winter and I begged my mother to let me stay at home, but my mother still made me get up crying from feeling sorry for having to send her 5-year-old boy to school. We stayed in cheder till afternoon, then came home for lunch and went back to school to have classes till evening. I didn’t have time left to play with other boys. My life became even more difficult when I went to a Czech school at the age of 6.