Talmud-Torah school in the interwar period. A group of Sokolowers from Chicago came to Sokolow to give children new clothes (and take this picture).
The economic crisis that broke out in the USA in 1929 spread to other European countries in the following years. The 1930s meant great poverty and hunger for many families. Some emigrated, others stayed in Poland, hoping that their fate would improve.
More than one hundred years ago, just after World War I, a Jewish Elementary School Nr. 2 has been founded in Sokolow Podlaski. The school’s teaching was based upon an innovative Dalton’s educational system which encouraged pupils to seek solutions on their own, or with the help of their peers. The children themselves discovered principles and rules, something which in pre-google times must have been a real challenge. The pupils were successful, and the school was appreciated on national scale.
Izaak Trumper, the director, born in Narewka, brought up the children in the spirit of assimilation and strongly opposed Zionism. “For many years there was no one to teach Jewish history and religion. Finally, when they hired someone, the new teacher, Mosze Migdal, had nothing to say in the school” - recalled many years later one of the pupils.
Trumper was a Polish patriot, who spoke Polish, wrote in Polish and, quite obviously, tried hard to become a member of the Polish community which kept rejecting him. He led the Jewish schoolchildren to take part in patriotic celebrations in Sokolow, and pretended not to hear the abuse heaped upon them by Christian children.
Trumper’s educational successes displeased the local school inspector who wanted to close the school down. He even succeeded and had the school shut down for several months. Another teacher (a Christian) instigated high school students to beat Trumper up. This teacher was later sentenced to six weeks in prison.
Later, Trumper moved to Warsaw. He did not survive the war. Nowadays, there is no one in Sokolow who would remember Trumper. But the building which housed this modern and patriotic school still stands. Perhaps, inside, one can still hear the echoes of his teachings?
#YomhaShoah
Here was the Secondary School No. 2 in Sokołów - the Polish Folk School for Jewish Children.
Moshe Zając recalled: "School number 1 was for Christian children. The curriculum of both schools did not differ in any way. School number 2 was, however, open on Sundays, and not on the Sabbath. Polish patriotic attitudes were not any weaker in the Jewish school than in non-Jewish one. It was thanks to the teachers who were completely assimilated and did not want to even hear about Jewish problems. The headmaster [Icko] Trumper, teachers [men] Grinberg, Gompl, Wachsberg, teachers [women] Steinerówna, Malewonczyk were staunch assimilationists. Trumper, Gompl and Wachsberg had leftist views and were opposed to Zionism. They had a great influence especially in the upper classes in the school. The school was the first to guarantee a general normal education.
The children at school felt very well, despite the strict headmaster who often pulled the students by the ears. The children liked their own school very much, a school for Jewish children only. Its great importance became even more apparent when the school was shut down a few years before the war. Jewish children had to learn alongside Christian ones. Oftentimes they returned home crying because of insults or even beaten up by their Christian colleagues. Anti-Semitism directed against Jewish children was as strong as the one directed against their parents.
I remember the Polish patriotic celebrations on May 1 or the special celebrations that took place in Sokołów on the occasion of the unveiling of the statue of Father Brzóska (a Polish patriot, hanged by the tsarist authorities after the uprising in 1863). There were no Jewish celebrations at school, but Jewish children took part in Polish ones en masse. All school children came to the unveiling of the monument. But the town officials did not even look at us and didn’t give us a special place. When the Christian children were brought to the church for the solemn mass, the teachers of the Jewish school saw fit to bring the Jewish children there and lined them up in rows in the square in front of the church. There, we heard the well-known shouts: "Jews to Palestine," and Christian children spat on us.
After the whole ceremony, when the peasant orchestra had stopped playing and all the Christian children and other institutions started to leave, only then did we go to the monument and lay a large wreath on behalf of our school. Even today I feel the taste of insults to which our assimilated teachers did not react.
Despite this, I think of them warmly, because they were the first to give us a taste of secular education and further learning."
We would not know this story if it were not for the translation from Yiddish into Polish of the Sokołów Memorial Book. In September, we will publish the first part of this book on the Internet for free. This is a very important and necessary project that you can support here https://pomagam.pl/sokolowpodlaski Without your support, we will be unable to translate the next parts and we will not know other stories like this one.
