Kehilla (modern)

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The Kehilla (pl.: Kehillot) is the local Jewish communal structure that was reinstated in the early twentieth century as a modern, secular, and religious sequel of the qahal in Central and Eastern Europe, more particularly in Poland's Second Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Kingdom of Romania, Lithuania, Ukrainian People's Republic, during the interwar period (1918–1940), in application of the national personal autonomy.

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Unlike the ancient Qahal/Kehilla, abolished in the Russian Empire by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844, [1] the modern Kehilla council was elected like a municipal council, with lists of candidates presented by the various Jewish parties: Agudat Yisrael, the religious and non religious Zionists, but also the marxist Bundists and Poalists, the liberal-minded secularist Folkists, et cetera. The initial project, as submitted by the Jewish delegations to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was to constitute a National Jewish Council for each state, out of representatives from the various kehilla councils, like the former Council of Four Lands. [2] [3]

The Kehilla during the interwar Lithuanian Republic

On March 4, 1920, a Law on kehillot was published in Lithuania, in which the kehilla was defined as a body recognized by public law with the right to impose taxes and to issue ordinances dealing with religious matters, education and philanthropy. [3]

The Warsaw Kehilla during the Second Polish Republic

In 1924, the Agudist candidate, Eliahu Kirszbraun, was elected as president and Jakób Trokenheim, another Agudist, as vice-president. The only other candidate for presidency was the Bundist Henryk Ehrlich. Finally, the kehilla executive reflected the composition of the council: 7 Orthodox, 6 Zionists, 1 Folkist, 1 Bundist. The Bund boycotted the 1931 elections in protest over the introduction by the Polish government, in order to favour its Agudist allies, of a “paragraph 20” in the Kehillot regulations which provided the Kehilla electoral commission with the possibility to reject a number of Agudat's opponents who were in their opinion not religious enough. In 1936, the Bund had now 15 seats out of 50 and Ehrlich was again candidate to the presidency, he got 16 votes, the Zionist candidate Yitshak Schipper 10, and the Agudist Jacob Trokenheim won by a plurality of 19 votes. [4]

Party or listnumber of seats
1924
number of seats
1931
votes 1936number of seats
1936
Agudath Yisrael 17198,07912
Aleksander Hasidim 3---
Grodzhisker Hasidim -2--
Sokolower Hasidim--1,3661
Nonpartisan Religious-3--
Zionists 14127,74911
Mizrahi 543,1634
Revisionist Zionists --1,1491
"Democrats"-2--
Bund 5(boycott)10,62215
Folkspartei 329661
Poale Zion Right --1,7792
Poalei Zion Left 218871
Philanthropic Org.
(Mr. Stueckgold)
1-1,5732
Assimilationists-2--
Other private lists-3--
Total5050-50

Modern Kehillot

Informally, Kehilla can be an all-encompassing term that refers to the entirety of a Jewish community's religious and secular society, [5] especially in regards to modern Ashkenazi Orthodox neighborhoods.

According to the Talmud, the ten things things a city needs for a Torah scholar to be able to study in it are "[a] court that [punishes] with lashes and punishes [with penalties]; a charity fund, collected by two and distributed by three; a synagogue; a bathhouse; a restroom; a physician; a surgeon; a notary; (a butcher); and a teacher of children." [6]

See also

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References

  1. Henry Abramson, The end of intimate insularity: new narratives of Jewish history in the post-Soviet era, in Acts of Symposium “Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia,” at Sapporo, Japan, on July 10–13, 2002
  2. Stopnicka Heller, Celia (1993). On the edge of destruction: Jews of Poland between the two World Wars. Wayne State University Press. p. 383. ISBN   978-0-8143-2494-3 . Retrieved 2009-12-01.
  3. 1 2 Gitelman, Zvi Y. (2003). The emergence of modern Jewish politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe. Univ of Pittsburgh Press. p. 275. ISBN   978-0-8229-4188-0 . Retrieved 2009-12-04.
  4. Bacon, Gershon C. (1996). The politics of tradition. Agudat Yisrael in Poland 1916-1939. Studies on Polish Jewry. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. p. 331. ISBN   965-223-962-3., pp.200, 220-222
  5. "Kehillah". Wordnik.com. Retrieved 2023-05-23.
  6. Talmud , b. Sanhedrin 17b:10