The Role of Judaism in Jewish Girls’ Technical Education in Lwów

• In Event: Religion and Jewish Education in Poland, 1915-1939

Abstract

In 1915, Cecylia Klaftenowa (or Klaften) opened the Handicrafts Workshops for Jewish Girls in Lwów (Warsztaty Rękodzielnicze dla Dziewcząt Żydowskich we Lwowie), which she went on to direct. Much like other contemporary relief programs, the workshops aimed to provide girls orphaned and made homeless by the Great War a chance to develop useful skills and to earn a meager living. Out of the Workshops, Klaftenowa built a girls’ gymnasium, which later became a model for similar enterprises in other Polish cities. Her program in domestic arts and classical gymnasium education was supplemented by a curriculum of Zionist education and crafts inspired by Jewish ritual objects.

The Jewish content of Klaftenowa’s school developed alongside of a changing mission. Whereas the Workshops had aimed to help poor girls (and women), Klaftenowa viewed the school as having liberatory potential for girls who otherwise would need to rely on a father’s or husband’s wealth. She implored all women to learn a trade as part of a developing women’s movement in Poland. Along with an ideology of economic liberation for women, Klaftenowa’s school also provided an education in Jewish national ideology and in liberal Zionism alongside an education in traditional Galician Jewish women’s crafts.

This paper explores the interrelationship between these two aspects of the school: Jewish and feminist. Klaftenowa’s view of women’s place within Judaism was on the whole negative. At the same time, the curriculum she developed was by all accounts infused with Jewish content in all subjects. National and gender liberation, for Klaftenowa, went side by side and informed each other. Indeed, she tried to liberate the school itself from outside funding, hoping to create a self-sustaining Jewish women’s enterprise.

The paper draws on interviews with Klaftenowa, reports from school inspectors, and correspondence between the school and its various funders, including the Joint Distribution Committee.

Author

• Sarah Ellen Zarrow, Western Washington University