I remember how poor mothers and sisters wept with despair when
some boy of the family was carried off or enlisted by the officers to be
a pupil of a Government school." Like the poimaniki, the poor and the
orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms shunned by
the rich and respectable, and though the Government not only condemned
the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared the twenty thousand
teachers who imparted instruction in them to be outlaws and criminals,
the melammedim pursued their vocation as ever, and the hadarim, Talmud
Torahs, yeshibot, and batte midrashim swarmed with students of the
prohibited learning.[17]
Nicholas was paid measure for measure, and the cunning of his ministers
was made of no avail by the shrewdness of his Jewish subjects. The
report of the Minister of Education, at the end of 1845, shows
incredible progress. It states that since the ukase of November 13,
1844, i.e. in the course of a single year, more than two thousand
schools of different grades were established in various cities of the
Pale, with more than one hundred and eighty thousand pupils, not
including the technical schools in Odessa, Riga, Kishinev, Vilna, and
Uman, with their hundreds of students! The truth was that, instead of
the reported Russification, there had set in a vigorous reaction, which
rendered the position more critical.
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