SUMMARY:

This article examines the culture of philanthropy that developed among the Jews of late imperial Kiev. Charitable giving and communal welfare served as political tools that benefactors used to push for greater acceptance of Jews in Russian society as well as to shape a new, healthy, and “cultivated” generation of Russian Jews. By creating a community of progressive philanthropic organizations independent of the male-dominated communal institutions, Jewish women played an important role in extending the boundaries of the Jewish community and identity and in the creation of a Jewish civil society that mirrored new developments in Russian society at-large.
As was the case in Western Europe, Jews in Kiev understood their philanthropic organizations as a means towards the end of integration into the surrounding society; it was hoped that institutions such as the Jewish Hospital would show Russians the true face of Judaism and Jews: caring for all, regardless of faith; forward-looking and progressive; helping to advance the country of which they were an integral part. Charity was also one of the few realms in which Jews could exert leadership in the public sphere, since Jewish political participation was restricted by the state (especially on the municipal level, where Jews lacked representation even after they had received the right to vote for the State Duma in 1906). And the array of “model institutions” they founded were indeed intended to be shining examples for the city, the region, and the entire empire: the Jewish Hospital was declared one of Kiev’s finest; the Brodsky Trade School was patterned after the best educational institutions in Europe; the OPE’s kindergarten adopted the latest pedagogical methods of Friedrich Froebel, German educational reformer and founder of the kindergarten. Moreover, the institutions that Kiev’s Jews created were nearly identical in their organization, goals, and methods to analogous hospitals, schools, shelters, and relief agencies then being established throughout the empire and elsewhere in Europe; more Russian than Jewish, the only thing they had in common with traditional hevrot were some nomenclature choices, such as calling poor relief “Tmikhe.” The only differences were the kosher food and the teaching of “Divine Law” (religion classes) in Judaism and not Christianity. Thus, the civil society that was developing throughout imperial Russia, and especially in its urban centers, was being replicated within Russian Jewish society as well.