How did Jewish communities in Eastern Europe imagine their future? One of the most important arenas for these debates was education. This mini-course invites participants to explore the rich and sometimes competing educational worlds available to Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

We will look at a wide range of schools, from Zionist Hebrew schools and secular Yiddish schools in interwar Poland to state schools attended by Jewish children from the nineteenth century to 1939. Through these examples, the course shows how schooling shaped everyday life, cultural belonging, and ideas of Jewish identity. Who founded these schools? What values did they promote? And how did students experience them?

Special attention will be given to questions of language and gender. The course explores why Jewish boys and girls often attended different kinds of schools, and how Orthodox education, Hebrew education, and professional training opened (or limited) possibilities for Jewish women. Together, these stories reveal how education became a key tool for imagining different Jewish futures.

This mini-course accompanies the temporary exhibition on languages at POLIN Museum and offers an engaging historical backdrop to the themes presented there.

Webinar series programme

• 17 May 2026

  Kamil Kijek: Can one reconcile Poland with Land of Israel/Palestine? Hebrew education and Jewish visions of future in Interwar Poland

  This webinar will discuss major dilemmas that stood before the Hebrew school educational systems in Interwar Poland, by looking at educational programs and the recorded experiences of pupils of Tarbut, Shul-Kult, Yavne and bilingual Polish-Hebrew schools’ networks. What were the controversies, discussions and educational praxis in relation to the Hebrew language? How did various Hebrew educational networks and their activists reconciled the emigration and building of Jewish national homeland in Palestine/Land of Israel with fighting for better future of Jewish national community in Poland?

  Kamil Kijek is an Assistant Professor and deputy director of Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. His first book, "Modern and Radical. Politics, Culture, and Socialization of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland" appeared in 2026 in English translation with Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2026. And his forthcoming book is titled "Polish Shtetl after the Holocaust? Cold War, Jewish World and Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, 1945-1950."

• 24 May 2026

  Aleksandra Jakubczak: Gender and Jewish Education in Modern Eastern Europe

  In Jewish society of the nineteenth century, education was shaped by clear gender divisions that defined different expectations and learning paths for boys and girls. While boys were typically the focus of formal religious education, girls’ schooling was more limited and often informal. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, new educational opportunities began to emerge for Jewish girls. This webinar focuses on vocational schools that offered young Jewish women practical training—often in professions such as dressmaking—reflecting the growing belief that women’s employment was essential for Jewish families facing economic challenges.

  Aleksandra Jakubczak is a scholar specializing in the social and economic history of East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on women, gender, migration, and transnationalism. In 2023 she received her PhD from Columbia University and, in 2024, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Since 2022, she has been working as a historian at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

• 31 May 2026

  Anna Szyba: For Yiddish to the barricades – TSYSHO schools in the interwar period

  When the Central Jewish School Organization was founded in 1921 at a ceremonial meeting at Warsaw’s Apollo Cinema, a new chapter began in the lives of many children from poor families of small traders, artisans, and laborers. For the first time, covered by the state-mandated compulsory education, they not only received the opportunity for a secular education, but also for instruction in the language of their daily lives—Yiddish.  But could this opportunity have been fully realized in the Second Polish Republic, and did it meet the expectations of the organization’s founders and activists, the youth, and Jewish parents?

  Anna Szyba is a cultural scholar and translator. She researches pedagogical methods used in schools of the Central Yiddish School Organization (TSYSHO) and is currently affiliated with United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the past she has worked for the Center for Yiddish Culture in Warsaw.

• 7 June 2026

  Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska: Jewish children in public schools in Habsburg Galicia

  Before the outbreak of the First World War around one hundred thousand Jewish children attended primary secular schools and another ten thousand secondary ones. Most of them learned in non-Jewish institutions, where they constituted a minority. This webinar explores the school experiences of those children: how did their everyday reality look like? Did they have an opportunity to develop their Jewish identity?  And how did public school influence the Galician Jewry in general?

  Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska is a historian who specializes in social and religious history of Central-European Jewry in the nineteenth century, especially in Habsburg Galicia. She works in the Institute of "Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University." Her latest book is entitled "Poza chederem. Żydzi w galicyjskiej szkole publicznej" [Beyond heder. Jews in public schools in Galicia] (2025).

Submissions

• Register
• Free of charge 

The mini-course is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.

This program was made possible thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, Libitzky Family Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.