Perushim (Old Yishuv)
.jpg){kind=spacer}
Perushim (פרושים segregated, singular: Poric ) were groups of religious Jews from Lithuania, followers of the Gaon of Vilna , who settled in Palestine in the 19th century. They belonged to the old yishuv .
The Holy Land in the teaching of the Vilna Gaon
Following the example of the Vilna Gaon, the Perushim withdrew from everyday business in order to be able to devote themselves entirely to studying the Torah. Twice, in 1772 and 1782, the Gaon himself tried to travel to the Holy Land. Every time he encountered difficulties, he was forced to abandon the project. His disciples tried to realize what the Gaon was denied:
- Raw Menachem Mendel,
- Raw Ezriel and his grandson Raw Yisrael as well
- Raw Binyamin Rivlin and his son Raw Hillel,
- all from the community in Schklou .
In 1781, Raw Ezriel went on an exploration trip to Palestine. He died on a second such trip, which put the settlement plans on hold for three decades. Only individuals from the followers of the Vilna Gaon, such as Rav Shlomo of Talachin, moved to the Holy Land in the 18th century.
Similar to the way in which the biblical Ezra had gathered the returnees from exile in Babylon in Jerusalem , the Vilna Gaon wanted to bring the Jewish diaspora of his time to Jerusalem and make the city the center of Torah study. By again following the Mitzvot , which are only applicable in the Holy Land, the Messianic Age ( Keitz haMegulah ) would be brought about.
Safed office
The first immigrant group was led by Rav Menachem Mendel von Schklou , a student of the Vilna Gaon, and arrived in Palestine in 1808. After a short stay in Tiberias , the Perushim settled in Safed. Two more groups followed shortly afterwards, so that the community comprised around 200 people. The actual destination was Jerusalem, but the laws in force at the time prohibited Ashkenazim (including Jews from Lithuania) from settling in the old city of Jerusalem. Rabbi Yisrael planned a permanent settlement in Safed. The city still suffered from the effects of the earthquake of 1759, so that the living conditions were very cramped. In everyday matters, the Perushim, who did not speak Arabic, were dependent on the help of their Sephardic neighbors. They founded the Beis Midrash haG'ra for their Talmudic studies and began building a library.
A peculiarity of the Perushim was the desire to fulfill the mitzvot, which is only valid in the land of Israel. Since these commandments related to agriculture, the group bought land near Safed and started farming. There was no intention to secure precarious supplies through agriculture.
In order to put the flow of donations to the Perushim of Safed on a safe basis, Rabbi Yisrael traveled to Europe in 1810. Donation boxes should be set up in each community and the funds should be brought by representatives to a central office in Volozhin. The Napoleonic Wars made his project difficult. Finally, Rabbi Yisrael used the donation to buy a shipload of wheat that the Perushim in Palestine could sell again; in this way it was hoped to avoid the risk of the money messenger being attacked and robbed. But the ship sank in the Mediterranean. The amount of money that Raw Yisrael brought with him on his return to Safed was not even enough to pay off the accrued debt. In 1812 Galilee was struck by a plague; of the approximately 500 Perushim in Safed, a third died, including almost the entire family of Rav Yisrael.
Rabbi Yisrael was in Jerusalem to attend the dedication of the Sukkas Shalom Synagogue when a severe blow in 1837 brought the end of the congregation in Safed. The city was practically leveled by an earthquake. There were very many fatalities. From now on, the Jerusalem settlement was the focal point for the surviving Perushim.
Branch in the old city of Jerusalem
A much smaller group around Rav Menachem Mendel and Rav Hillel had, despite all the difficulties, settled in Jerusalem shortly after the immigration. Rav Hillel had written a book ( KolhaTor ) that contained a fiery appeal to settle in the Holy City. This prepares the Messiah for the coming. He interpreted the verse of Song of Songs 2:12 allegorically: “The flowers appear in the land (= Jewish settlements are founded in Palestine), the time for singing (= the messianic age) has arrived. The voice of the turtle dove (= the people who contribute to it) can be heard in our country. "
Quite a few parishioners made their way from Safed to the Holy City, and Rabbi Yisrael realized that a settlement in Jerusalem's old city would have to be organized, even if the financial support from Europe would then be divided between the recipients in Safed and Jerusalem. A delegation was sent to Constantinople. She managed to get the firman banned from Ashkenazim from settling in the old town.
An Ashkenazi community (Kollel) was established in Jerusalem, which the few Hasidim in the city also joined in 1821 . The tasks of the Kollel were:
- Integration of immigrants,
- Distribution of donations,
- Construction of water reservoirs (the water supply in the old city of Jerusalem was always precarious),
- Maintenance of a private security team,
- Correspondence with the Jewish diaspora and with the Ottoman authorities,
- Defense against Christian missionaries,
- Development of Jewish neighborhoods in the old and later in the new town,
- Organization of charitable groups such as Bikkur Cholim .
The community leadership (later named Vaad haKlali ) was initially in the neighborhood of the Hurva Synagogue and later in the New Town, in the Beis David district.
In 1827 Sir Moses Montefiore visited Palestine and met in Jerusalem the 70-year-old Rav Rivlin, the spiritual leader of the Perushim. Montefiore then made the support of the Jews in Jerusalem his concern.
When Palestine was under the rule of Mohammed Ali Pasha, the situation of the Perushim in Jerusalem improved. They had the ownership of the inner-city property Dir Ashkenaz, on which the Hurva synagogue was located, confirmed and obtained a building permit. In 1836 the clean-up began and in 1837 the Menachem Zion School was inaugurated, named after Rav Menachem Mendel von Schklou.
Raw Hillel died in 1838 at the age of eighty from an epidemic rampant in Jerusalem. The following year, Rav Yisrael, who had settled in Jerusalem after the great earthquake and headed the Sukkas Shalom synagogue, died. The two were followed by rabbis of the second generation, Rav Jeschaja "Schaje" Bordaki (Menachem Zion Synagogue) and Rav Nasan Nata (Sukkas Shalom Synagogue).
The crisis of 1840
For the year 1840, the year 5600 Jewish calendar, the Perushim expected the beginning of the messianic age. When this event did not happen, it meant a serious crisis for the church.
For the Perushim, the Christian missionaries in Jerusalem, who were also motivated by eschatological expectation, were a new experience. Their charitable work in the face of hunger and epidemics in the late 1830s made an impression. Three prominent Peruschim, Eliezer Luria (from the relatives of Rabbi Hillel von Schklau), Benjamin Goldberg and Abraham Nisan Walfin, established closer contact with the missionaries of the London Society in 1839. Walfin withdrew again; the other two converted to Christianity in 1843. The names of the two converts were removed from the membership list of the Bikkur Cholim organization ; next to it is the note: "May his name and his memory be erased, he is under a spell."
The leadership of the Peruschim responded to the religious crisis on the one hand by trying to cut off all contact with missionaries, on the other hand by redefining salvation from a sudden event to a lengthy process that began in 1840. She therefore got involved in projects such as the reconstruction of the Hurva synagogue. In the course of the 1840s, however, the opinion grew that building housing and infrastructure would not bring salvation any closer and that one should concentrate entirely on studying the Torah. That was a new interpretation of the Bible verse Ps 127: 1. Compared to the Hasidim and Sephardim, the Perushim could now appear as a backward-looking group to outside observers.
According to Arie Morgenstern, the Peruschim had to respond directly to current needs instead of building according to plan. An external symptom for this is that the study facilities ( Kolelim ) split up according to the origin of the Talmud students: Warsaw Kolel in 1848, Grodno Kolel in 1851, etc. Each Kolel tried to raise as much donation as possible from home; The overriding interests of the Jewish population in Jerusalem were neglected.
Contemporary descriptions of the Perushim
Ludwig August Frankl went on a trip to Palestine in 1856. He wrote that Jerusalem had a total population of 18,000 people, 5,700 Jews, of which the Sephardim made up the majority with about 4,000 people. He puts the number of Perushim as a subgroup of the Ashkenazim at 850 people. Frankl's negative judgment about this community is to be understood against the background of the crisis of 1840: “Fanatic, bigot, intolerant, contentious and in truth not religious, the appearance and the observation of the ceremonial laws are everything to them, morality little, custom nothing. And so they deliver ... by far the largest contingent to those paid by the mission society to Christianity. ”Frankl viewed the study to which the Peruschim devoted themselves intensively: they did not study the Tanach at all, or they only knew it indirectly through the study of the Talmud, which remains a "mechanical matter of memory"; there is not a Talmud researcher among them.
The Peruschim do not have a real spiritual leader, but Rabbi Shaye Bordaki leads the community. All were born in the Russian Empire and, when asked by the Russian state to return there, refused to do so. Since then, they have been "surrendered" by Russia and have placed themselves under the protection of the English, but mostly the Austrian consulate.
Frankl names various groups close to the Peruschim: the Warsaw, a mixed community of Peruschim and Hasidim of about 150 people, and the Ansche Hod , about 60 Jews who immigrated from Holland and Germany ( Hod is an acronym for "Holland and Germany"), the orientated themselves to the way of life of the Peruschim and became related to them. The Ansche Hod are the only group in which the donations from Europe are distributed so effectively that everyone has a livelihood and there are no poor people.
Bernhard Neumann, the former head physician of the Meir Rothschild Hospital in Jerusalem, wrote in 1877 that the Peruschim followed the German rite in the liturgy and that they were based on the method founded by Jakob Pollak ( Pilpul ) when studying the Talmud . Within this community there are 3,000 Perushim from Russia, 700 Warsaw residents, 500 Hungarians and 100 German-Dutch.
Perushim neighborhoods in Jerusalem's New City
When Jewish residential quarters outside the Old City began to be built in the 1860s, prominent Perushim also took part, such as Joseph Rivlin and Joel Moses Solomon. However, in accordance with the reorientation after 1840, these were private initiatives that were not supported by the leadership of the Peruschim.
| image | neighborhood | founding year | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kerem (Vilna Houses) | 1885/86 | Later became part of Kerem Avraham. | |
| Even Yehoshua (Halperin Houses) | 1891 | ||
|
Batei Ungarin, Hungary houses (Ohel Yitzhak, Nahalat Tzvi) | 1892 | Residential area built by Hungarian residents. In 1914 it comprised over 100 apartments, a synagogue, a house for Torah study and a large mikveh. Belongs to the type of Kolel neighborhoods established by charitable donors for destitute Talmud students. |
| Dameseq Eliezer (Batei Grodno, Grodno houses) | 1892 | ||
| Agudat Shlomo (Batei Milner, Milner Houses) | 1892 | ||
| Bet Avraham | 1892 | ||
| Batei Krohnheimer, Krohnheimer houses | 1893 | Part of the Knesset Yisrael. | |
| Old Knesset Yisrael | 1893-1912 | ||
| Jakobson houses | 1893/94 | Part of the Knesset Yisrael. | |
| Probably Kolel A | 1896 | ||
|
Nahalat Yaakov (Warsaw Houses) | 1897 | |
| Minsk-Kolel | 1902 | ||
|
Ohalei Yaakov (Broide Houses) | 1902/03 | |
| Romanian Kolel | 1907 | ||
| Batei Transylvania, Transylvanian houses | 1908 | ||
| Chert houses (Wohlin Kolel B) | 1908-1910 |
Bikkur Cholim Hospital
.jpg)
Bikkur Cholim (" Visiting the Sick ") was an organization founded by the Peruschim in 1837 for the purpose of nursing. The congregation was responding to the work of English missionaries who were also trained medical professionals. First, the members of Bikkur Cholim cared for the sick at home.
Baron James Rothschild bought property by the Zion Gate that belonged to the Sephardic community. It was there in 1854 that the first Jewish hospital in Jerusalem ( Meir Rothschild Hospital , later renamed Misgav Ladach ) began its work. The Bikkur Cholim Hospital in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, built by the Peruschim , opened in 1858 and was smaller (12 beds). It soon proved to be too small given the growing Jewish population in Jerusalem. In 1864 a courtyard with two buildings was purchased ( Ashkenasi Perushim Hospital ). When cholera broke out in Jerusalem in 1866 , like all medical facilities in the city, it was operating to the limit. Moses Montefiore described the hospital in his diary as it appeared in 1875: two wards for men and women with eight beds each.
The construction of a new Bikkur Cholim Hospital in the New Town, started in 1912, stalled due to the First World War and was completed in 1925 during the British mandate. The hospital was on King George Street. The hospital in the old town continued to operate; In 1947 the patients were evacuated with the help of the British military and transferred to the Bikkur Cholim Hospital in New Town.
The Bikkur Cholim Hospital has been run as a religious hospital to this day. It is adjacent to the Geula and Me'a She'arim districts , so ultra-Orthodox residents can walk to it on the Sabbath .
Etz-Khayim-yeshiva
Etz Chayim was founded as a Talmud Torah school for orphans in the early 1850s. The head of the facility, which was located in the vicinity of the Hurva Synagogue, was Raw Samuel Salant (1816–1909), who later became the Ashkenazi chief rabbi. During the Ottoman period, Etz Chayim was the most important educational institution of Ashkenazi Judaism in Jerusalem, especially for the children of the Perushim, as the Hasidim had their own school.
The curriculum was initially purely religious. In 1867 two hours a day were set aside for writing and arithmetic, which, however, did not satisfy critics. With the First World War, support from donations was lost. In 1917 Etz Chayim's existence was threatened and the management had to agree to extensive reforms of the curriculum, including the introduction of Hebrew as the language of instruction in non-religious subjects. Jehiel Michel Tykocinski's commitment led the educational institution to flourish during the mandate period. In 1929 she moved to a neighborhood on Machane Jehuda Market and had branches in other Jerusalem districts.
In 2005 Etz Chayim had around 1000 students, spread over three locations, including the historic campus at Machane-Jehuda-Markt. There is also a Kolel (Talmud Academy for married young men), a cafeteria and a library.
Perushim today
The Jerusalem Peruschim have joined the anti-Zionist organization Edah HaChareidis and form the non-Hasidic part of it. Edah HaChareidis deals, among other things, with the certification of kosher products, the maintenance of mikvahs and a rabbinical advisory service for questions relating to Halacha . Also Neturei Karta is considered a founding Perushim.
The Perushim are recognizable by their costume: a flat hat in Jerusalem style and a coat with a belt. On the Sabbath they wear a gold caftan and usually black trousers. In order to maintain the special tradition of the Perushim, the Kahal Perushim Yerushalaim community was founded in the 1990s . The yeshivot are united in the Ichud Bnei Yeshivos Prushim network , which is subordinate to Edah HaChareidis . Except in Jerusalem ( Me'a She'arim ), there are branches of Perushim in Bet Shemesh , Betar Illit and Kirjat Sefer .
literature
- Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel. Oxford University Press, 2007
- Ruth Kark, Michal Oren-Nordheim: Jerusalem and Its Environs: Quarters, Neighborhoods, Villages 1800–1948 . The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem 2001.
- Dovid Rossoff: Safed: The Mystical City . Shaar Books, Jerusalem 1991.
- Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth: Jewish Life in Jerusalem from Medieval Times to the Present. 6th edition, Jerusalem 2004.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Immanuel Etkes: The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and his Image , Berkeley / Los Angeles 2002, p. 213.
- ↑ a b Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 168th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 169th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff, Safed , S. 138th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff, Safed , S. 140th
- ↑ David E. Fishman: Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov. New York University Press, New York / London 1995, p. 131.
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 175th
- ↑ a b Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 174th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 194th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 185th
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 193rd
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 194th
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 178. Both were baptized on May 21st and were given the names Christian Lazarus Luria and John Benjamin Goldberg.
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 179 f.
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 191 f.
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 195 f.
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 196.
- ^ A b Ludwig August Frankl: To Jerusalem! Part two: Palestine. Leipzig 1858. p. 48.
- ↑ Ludwig August Frankl: To Jerusalem! Part two: Palestine. Leipzig 1858. p. 54 f.
- ↑ Ludwig August Frankl: To Jerusalem! Part two: Palestine. Leipzig 1858. p. 50 f.
- ↑ Ludwig August Frankl: To Jerusalem! Part two: Palestine. Leipzig 1858. p. 59.
- ↑ Bernhard Neumann: T he holy city and its inhabitants in their natural-historical, cultural-historical, social and medical conditions , Hamburg 1877, p. 370.
- ^ Arie Morgenstern: Hastening Redemption , Oxford 2007, p. 199.
- ↑ Ruth Kark, Michal Oren-Nordheim: Jerusalem and Its Environs , p. 104.
- ↑ Dovid Rossoff: Where Heaven Touches Earth , Jerusalem 2004, p 242nd
- ↑ a b c Jay Levinson: Annals of a Traveler. In: The Jewish Magazine. May 2008, accessed August 7, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c Menachem Friedman: Eẓ Ḥayyim. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica. Encyclopedia.com, accessed August 7, 2019 .
- ↑ (Ha) Edah HaChareidis / העדה החרדית. Retrieved August 7, 2019 .
- ↑ The Perushim. Retrieved August 7, 2019 .