Jewish children's home (Kovno)

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The Jewish children's home in Kovno is the second establishment of the doctor and educator Siegfried Lehmann after the Jewish people's home in Berlin . He founded the facility in 1921 at the invitation of the Jewish National Council in Lithuania to improve the care for Jewish children and young people.

prehistory

The history of the Jewish Children's Home is closely linked to the person of

and its previous work in

According to Beate Lehmann, Siegfried Lehmann made “in the Jewish people's home his first steps on the path that would later lead him, as he had wished, to Eastern Europe and finally to Erez Israel”. But, even if this may have been the desired path, the departure from the Volkshaus also seems to have been frustrated. "After the end of the war, Lehmann also hoped to make progress with the expansion of the Volksheim idea, but soon had to resignedly realize that he could not establish an independent Jewish community in Berlin." From this point of view, it should have been the chance for a fresh start for Lehmann. when he was asked by the Jewish National Council of Lithuania in 1921 to “organize child welfare among the Jewish population”.

In Kovno, Lehmann again followed up on the ideas of the settlement movement that had already led him in Berlin. He tried to create an institution that was more than the mostly only protective children's homes. The children's home had “an educational, a medical and a social department. The pedagogical department, the children's home, was set up for around 200 children from the first months of life through to adolescence. Workshops and a small farm were attached to it, as well as a clothing distribution point, a child protection office and an infant welfare center. "

The clientele of the children's home

The first children looked after by Lehmann and his helpers belonged to the Jewish population of Lithuania evacuated during the war, which was now flowing back to their homeland. But the focus quickly shifted to neglected young people , “children and young people who had escaped pogroms or whose parents lived in unspeakable economic hardship, so that they had to get through life begging and standing without parents and without accommodation”. For Lehmann, these children, to whom “the childhood experience of love remained alien”, had no other chance than to become psychopaths or “as juvenile criminals to take revenge on society for their childhood devoid of love”. So it wasn't surprising to him

“That these children, who were picked up from the street, were in the first place towards their educators or other adults with pronounced hatred. If the educators were also friendly and different from the policemen or porters in the houses or the employees of the social bureau, with whom the children had previously come into unpleasant contact, double caution was required here in particular; because this goodness was certainly nothing more than a mask that one would suddenly drop at the appropriate moment in order to catch it all the more safely. "

“This horde of neglected street children, some of whom have led the lives of vagabonds for years,” to develop into a community that “takes a leading part in the upbringing of the younger generation in the children's home” and “to a center of the Jewish youth movement in Lithuania ”was the task that Lehmann set himself.

Radical self-management under the condition of productive work

Given this initial situation and these goals, it is not difficult to see parallels to Makarenko's forms of collective education and his approaches to rehabilitating neglected young people. Perhaps more resolutely than Lehmann, however, Lehmann relied on a model of extensive self-administration and self-responsibility of young people, as was also practiced in some children's republics . In this process, it was possible to develop the initial struggle of the children against the children's home and its management through an interim co-determination to a model "in which we gave the young people self-administration in all areas". Lehmann described the radicalism of this model in 1929, as already in Ben Shemen:

“We also reject the kind of self-administration, where a lot of pedagogy and tactics are used to pretend that the boys act independently, but where they are moved from above like puppets behind the scenes. We reject this type because it is not honest and therefore cannot be good. Furthermore, we are becoming more and more convinced that pedagogy begins where the human element is no longer sufficient. "Pedagogy" is a good thing where the teacher teaches the children a few hours a day. The fluid that flows over from one person to the other, with whom he lives day and night, does not flow in this case, and instead of this intercourse, which takes place not in the light but in the unconscious, the intention here must have an educational effect, pedagogy , to step. But in a community where educators and children live together day in and day out, year in and year out, where there are so many opportunities to see each other naked, the whole being of the people, their essence, has far less effect on the educational efforts and tactics. "

A decisive role in this process towards real self-administration of the children's home by its residents played "the joint work for the maintenance of the facility in the craft, agricultural and also in the educational area":

“In the beginning these were simple tasks like handing out laundry or food. Since Lehmann believed in the social strength of young people, he gradually gave them the opportunity to take part in all the processes and work in the children's home. So they gradually took on more and more responsible services, such as in the area of ​​the baby welfare center or the ambulance. 'Productive work' became the highest ethical imperative and formed the guideline for education in Kovno. "

Just as self-administration in Kovno was more than just an educational concept, work here meant “different and more than the production of the star box at Georg Kerschensteiner's , different and more than the educational reform attempt to turn the conventional book school into a work school by introducing manual activities . In the Children's Republic, work is one of the essential foundations of community life, a field of collective planning, organization and accountability ”.

The special demands the children's home placed on its employees can be gleaned from a remark by Lehmann: “We had always avoided using force to achieve something within a short period of time, something that was done by the young people themselves in twice, even three times as long could be experienced and realized. However, the application of this principle required a special degree of patience from all adults who were in contact with the children's home. "

From self to collective

Lehmann described the step from overcoming one's self to becoming a collective as a significant development. He describes in detail this process, which is associated with many errors and confusions, and which presented the children's home with difficult challenges. It began with the young people from the children's home organizing themselves in the “Youth Group of the Workers' Party”. “It was no longer a matter of securing the material achievements of one's own limited group, but those of all working mankind.” Lehmann describes this process against the background of the experiences of young people who experienced their own social exclusion only through a burning hatred of everything could compensate for what had to do with civil society. He does not conceal the fact that the bourgeois educators in the children's home also got into the line of fire, but the fight against everything that has been passed had bigger dimensions for the young people: in their eyes religion was a matter of the bourgeoisie and should therefore be rejected. The same was true of Zionism. "Zionism and the capitalist social order were completely one for the boys coming from the lowest social classes, and therefore no means seemed too bad to finally settle accounts with this so-called 'method of the Jewish bourgeoisie of keeping the Jewish working class in slavery'." But Lehmann trusted that the youth in party life would not find the fulfillment they were looking for; they did not find in the party that “what every youth longed for, a community”. To the extent that the young people became aware of this, this led to a crisis in community life within the children's home, out of which, however, “seeds of new group formation” developed. These germs unfolded around an empty house that some young people had discovered and which they managed to repair and decorate on their own.

“After weeks of work, the young people had finished their own furniture and the day of the inauguration had come. A group of members came together to form a community after it had taken several weeks to choose who would be capable of such community life. Everyone felt that a new period was now being prepared in the development of the children's home. For the first time one began to slowly feel the beauty of a coexistence that did not get its meaning through common struggle and common hatred, but was based on the warm relationship between person and person, in youthful eros. "

But this youthful eros did not prove to be a permanent binding factor, the group formation based on it with the inherent tendency to eliminate reality borrowed from the bourgeois youth movement led to a further crisis within the community, which could only then experience a positive turn as “the Form of the community got a content where a common idea firmly rooted in reality could connect with the youthful eros ”. In the children's home there were two basic ideas that formed the basis for further development:

  • Some of the young people, mainly those who had previously shown a strong interest in party work, turned more and more to the ideal of people's work in the Golus and sought careers such as elementary school teachers, employees at workers' training institutions or nurses.
  • Initially a small part of the young people turned to Palestine and became involved with the Hashomer Hatzair and the Hechaluz movement. Their ideal was to become a farmer or craftsman in Palestine.

When Lehmann wrote about this development in 1926, he could assume that both groups, together around 70 to 80 young people, had found stable forms of community. “It seems as if the youth here, after long wrong turns, found the form of coexistence that frees the maximum of forces that can be awakened by community, and at the same time requires the minimum of suppression of individuality in favor of community. [..] Over the years, leadership and youth have come together in the 'Kinderhaus' to form a close community, and this unity is the basis for the success of the big project that the' Kownoer Kinderhaus' is about to realize today. ”This' big project 'For some of the young people the move to Palestine should be.

“Prepared for this task, they will form the nucleus for a children's and youth village in which several hundred of the best among the Jewish orphan youth from all the countries of Galuth will later find a place. Perhaps this village will grow beyond the scope of an orphan settlement and become the 'educational province' of the Jewish people, a power center for a people who are renewing themselves, as Goethe described it to the German people in 'Wilhelm Meister'. "

On the way to Palestine

When Lehmann wrote his assessments of the children's home, the decision in favor of Palestine had long been made. "A wave of arrests of teachers in Kovno in 1925 thwarted the plan of a 'dramatic group' to finance the Aliyah through public performances, and at the same time made it clear that a future could only be imagined in Palestine." As a result, Lehmann founded 1926 in Berlin the Jüdische Waisenhilfe EV Society for the promotion of the education of Jewish orphans for productive work . The chairman of this association, which supported the children's home in Kovno and was supposed to financially support the emigration to Palestine, was Elsa Einstein, Albert Einstein's wife ; the presidium included Martin Buber and Max Brod and Lola Hahn-Warburg , while Eugen Caspary , Mary Warburg , Hermann Wronker and Margarete Tietz sat on the central committee . At the end of 1926, Siegfried Lehmann set out for Palestine with the first group of young people. They made a stopover in Berlin at the Ahawah children's home for four weeks because they still had to wait for the entry certificates.

At the beginning of 1927 Siegried Lehmann and his second wife, the doctor Rivkah Rebecca Klivanski († 1959), brought the first group to Palestine, followed in July 1927 by the second under the direction of Akiva Yishai (Akiba Vanchotzker) and his wife Chaja Radin. Probably her first point of contact was not yet Ben Shemen, as Lehmann wrote in 1926 before she left: “In the near future, an older group of children's homes will be going over to Palestine to prepare the ground for a children's and youth settlement there in Emek Israel; younger groups, along with their guides, will follow. They are [..] form the nucleus of a children's and youth village. "In this nucleus for the later children's and youth village Ben Shemen in Emek Israel, the Jezreel Valley in what is now Israel North District , there should be around the children's village in Giwath Hamoreh traded have, about which its founder and leader, Sch. S. Pugatschow, following Lehmann's article From the street horde to community in the magazine Der Jude reported. Why Lehmann did not go straight to Ben Shemen is not known, but his vision of the germ cell became reality. A children's and youth village gradually emerged in Ben Shemen, "which was to become the most prestigious institution of its kind in Israel".

Hans Lubinski and the Jewish Youth and Apprenticeship Home

The children's home in Kovno was given up in 1930. His last head and Lehmann's successor was the pediatrician Hans Lubinski (* 1900 in Berlin - † 1965 in Israel), who then headed the Jewish youth and apprenticeship home in Wolzig . Sharon Gillerman makes it clear how much Lubinski, who received his doctorate in Freiburg in 1926, was shaped by the ideals of the children's home:

“The directors of the Commission for Young People at Risk have given Dr. Hans Lubinski, the former director of the Kovno children's home, was employed to initiate this new path in the education of young people at risk with the help of the new Jewish educational institution in Wolzig on the outskirts of Berlin. As Wolzig's first director, Lubinski introduced new guidelines that abolished punishments, removed annoying restrictions typical of the old system, and instead gave young people more freedom of movement. He was aware of the influence of the youth movement (education of the youth by the youth) and emphasized education for responsibility and autonomy - together with a new accent on "youth community". This reflected his experiences in the Kovno Children's Home and the meanwhile widespread influence of the youth movement. He even left the gates of the house unlocked permanently, much to the horror of the Wolzig residents.
Lubinski distanced himself from the old educational methods as the wrong means of rehabilitation. Beyond the progressive pedagogical changes that have been made in Wolzig, this change of orientation is most clearly seen in Lubinski's approach to neglect. "

Similar to Kovno, Lubinski also had to struggle with great difficulties at the beginning. “The new principles demanded a lot from both sides. Pupils and educators, and it took time for the system to work. Hans Lubinski later openly admitted that he was too optimistic at first, and after two months he gave up the idea of ​​total self-government. He realized that it was necessary to adapt step by step, because otherwise the young people and young men would feel overwhelmed by the new tasks and duties. After some adjustments, the system worked properly; In 1931 it was reported that the decision-making included the assignment of work and even details of meal planning. "

Hans Lubinski was licensed as a doctor in Nahalal in March 1939 . Nothing is known about his further activities in Palestine and later in Israel.

swell

literature

  • Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , in: Sabine Hering, Harald Lordick, Gerd Stecklina (eds.): Jewish youth movement and social practice , Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2017, ISBN 978-3-943787-77 -1 , pp. 103-122.
  • Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jewish Settlements in Europe. Approaches to a transnational social, gender and ideological historical research , Medaon - www.medaon.de, Issue 4, 2009.
  • Dieter Oelschlägel: The Jewish Settlement Movement. A search for clues , in: Social work. Journal for Social and Socially Related Areas , Volume 61:
    • Part 1: Issue 1.2012, pp. 2–11
    • Part 2: Issue 2.2012, pp. 42–50
  • Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹. Siegried Lehmann (1892-1958) , in: Sabine Hering (ed.): Jüdische Wohlfahrt im Spiegel von Biographien , Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, ISBN 978-3-936065-80-0 , pp. 256-267.
  • Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to the Jewish culture". The children's and youth village Ben Shemen between Berlin and Lod - a sketch , in: Monika Lehmann / Hermann Schnorbach (ed.): Enlightenment as a learning process. Festschrift for Hildegard Feidel-Mertz , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-7638-0186-3 , pp. 256-274.
  • Ludwig Liegle: Children's Republics. Documentation and interpretation of a "modern" form of education , in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Vol. 35 (1989), Issue 3, pp. 399-416

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120
  2. ↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 11
  3. ↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 263
  4. ↑ a b Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 263
  5. ↑ a b c Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 24
  6. ↑ a b Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 264
  7. ↑ For this, see Johannes-Martin Kamp: Children's Republics. History, practice and theory of radical self-government in children's and youth homes Leske + Budrich, Opladen, 1995, ISBN 3-8100-1357-9 . ( available online here )
  8. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 25
  9. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 109
  10. ^ Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni. An educational biography , master's thesis, Berlin, 2008, p. 22
  11. ↑ Ludwig Liegle: Children's Republics , p. 403
  12. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 28
  13. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 28
  14. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 31
  15. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 32
  16. ↑ a b Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 33
  17. ↑ a b Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 34
  18. ↑ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , pp. 35–36
  19. ↑ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , pp. 35–36
  20. ↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 259
  21. ↑ Jewish Yearbook for Greater Berlin , 1931, pp. 113/114
  22. ↑ See: Warburg (family)
  23. ↑ Encyclopedia.com: CASPARY, EUGEN (1863-1931), German social welfare pioneer
  24. ↑ Hanni Ullmann, quoted from Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 265
  25. ^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 36
  26. ↑ Sch. S. Pugatschow: Das Kinderdorf im Emek Jesreel , in: Der Jude, Jg. 9 (1925–1927), no. 2 (1926): special issue education, pp. 36–50. The text is available online through the collections of the University Library of the University of Frankfurt am Main
  27. ↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 265
  28. ↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 273 (note 14)
  29. ↑ Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economics, public life . Saur, Munich, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11420-6 , p. 461.
  30. ^ Claudia Prestel: Youth in Need. Welfare education in German-Jewish society (1901-1933) , Böhlau Verlag, Vienna Cologne Weimar, 2003, ISBN 3-205-77050-1 , p. 315
  31. ^ German Digital Library: Doctoral degrees from the Medical Faculty Freiburg
  32. ↑ Sharon Gillerman: Germans into Jews. Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimarer Republic , Stanford University Press, Stanford (California), 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-5711-9 , p. 133. “The directors of the Commission on Endangered Youth hired Dr. Hans Lubinski, erstwhile director of Kinderhaus Kovno, to light the way for this new path in correctional education by means of the new Jewish correctional education facility at Wolzig, on the outskirts of Berlin. As Wolzig's first director, Lubinski introduced new policies that eliminated punishment, removed burdensome restrictions that were typical of the old regime, and instead granted boys greater freedom of movement. He acknowledged the influence of the youth movement (education of youth by youth) and education for responsibility and autonomy, along with a new emphasis on a “youth community”. This reflected his experience at Kinderhaus Kovno and the now ubiquitous imprint of the youth movement. He even left the gates of the home permanently unlocked, much to the dismay of Wolzig's viIlagers.
    Lubinski disavowed the old educational methodologies as having been the wrong means of rehabilitation. But even beyond the progressive pedagogical changes that were enacted at Wolzig, this change in orientation can be seen most compellingly in Lubinski`s approach to neglect. "
  33. ^ Claudia Prestel: "Youth in Need". Correctional Education and Family Breakdown in German Jewish Families , in: Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar (Ed.): In Search of Jewish Community. Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria 1918-1933 , Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998, ISBN 0-253-33427-6 , p. 209. “The new principles demanded much from both inmates and educators, and it took some time for the system to work. Hans Lubinski later admitted frankly that in the beginning he was too optimistic, and after two months he gave up the idea of ​​total self-administration. He realized there was a need for gradual adaptation since otherwise the adolescents and young men would feel overburdened by the new responsibilities and duties. After some adjustment, the system worked adequately; by 1931 it was reported that decisionmaking included allocation of work and even details of the menu. "
  34. ^ The Palestine Gazette , April 6, 1939, p. 349