Yet Lilienthal
was advised (1841) to advertise for three hundred teachers in Germany.
Finally the Government decided to employ Jews as teachers of Hebrew
only, the least important subject in the curriculum; for instruction in
the secular branches none but Christians were eligible. No Jews were
allowed to become rectors in their own schools, and their salaries were
so small that they could not support themselves without teaching an
additional class, which was prohibited. A Jew might, indeed, become an
"honorable overseer" (pochotny blyustityel), to mediate between pupils
and parents, but the title was the only pay attached to the office.
Respectable parents, therefore, kept their children at home, or rather
in the heder, and many a child's name was on the roll of attendance who
was not even aware of the existence of the school. "Every year in the
autumn," relates a writer a quarter of a century later, "there was a
kind of compulsory recruiting of Jewish children for the Government
school, accompanied sometimes by struggles between the victims and their
enemies,--scenes without a parallel, in some respects, in the civilized
world.
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