10 | JULY 6 • 2023 

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued from page 8

A catechism is a kind 
of creed, right? It’s a 
statement of religious 
beliefs. “These are things 
we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had 
that, but they were also 
philosophical meditations in 
many ways. Typically, the first 
question of the catechism was, 
what is religion? And then the 
second question is, what is 
Jewish religion? 
And then I started reading 
them. They were question-
and-answer summaries of 
the whole of Judaism: belief, 
practices, holidays, Bible, you 
name it, that the children 
were expected to memorize. 
This idea that you’ve got 
to cram these kids with 
knowledge went against this 
historiographic dismissal 
of this period as being very 
thin and that kids were not 
really learning anything. The 
idea that children had a lot 
to learn is something that 
Sunday school educators 
actually really wrestle with 
during this period. 

What was the other thing 
that led you to pursue this 
subject?
When I was beginning to 
research my dissertation, I 
was working as a Hebrew 
school teacher in a large 
Reform Hebrew school in 
Washington, D.C. And I 
remember very distinctively 
the rabbi coming in and 
addressing the teachers at 
the start of the school year. 
He said, “I don’t care if a 
student comes through this 
Hebrew school and they don’t 
remember anything that they 
learned. But I care that at 
the end of the year they feel 
like the temple is a place that 
they want to be, that they feel 
like they have relationships 

there and they have an (he 
didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ 
[emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there 
by day at the Library of 
Congress, reading these 
catechisms that are saying, 
“Cram their heads with 
knowledge.” What is the 
relationship between Jewish 
education as a place where 
one is supposed to acquire 
knowledge and a place where 
one is supposed to feel 
something and to develop 
affective relationships? The 
swing between those two 
poles was happening as far 
back as the 19th century.

Can you give us an idea of 
the classroom experience? 
Are you reading the Bible 
in English or Hebrew? 
You are probably going for 
an hour or two on a Sunday 
morning. It’s a big room, and 
your particular class would 
have a corner of the room. 
It’s quite chaotic. Most of 
the teachers were female 
volunteers. They were either 
young and unmarried, or 
older women whose children 
had grown. Except for the 
students who are preparing 
for confirmation — the grand 
kind of graduation ritual for 
Sunday schools. Those classes 
were typically taught by the 

rabbi, if there was a rabbi 
associated with the school.
There would be a lot of 
reading out loud to the stu-
dents with students being 
expected to repeat back what 
they had heard or write it 
down so they had a copy for 
themselves. Often the day 
would begin with prayers said 
in English, and often the read-
ing of the Torah portion, typ-
ically in English, although in 
many Sunday schools, we do 
have children reporting they 
learned bits of Hebrew by rote 
memorization. Or they mem-
orized the first chapters of the 
book of Genesis, for example, 
but I’m not sure that they 
quite understood what they 
memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” 
is a song that often children 
tell us [in archival materials] 
that they had memorized 
in Hebrew. They probably 
would have learned at least 
Hebrew script, and a little bit 
of Hebrew decoding. But it 
is fair to say that if they were 
reading the Bible, they were 
reading it mostly in English, 
because you have to remem-
ber that most of the women 
who were volunteering to 
teach in these schools came 
of age in a generation where 
Hebrew education wasn’t 
extended to women. 

What’s the goal of these 
Sunday schools? 
The Sunday school movement 
arose because there was 
a whole generation of 
immigrant children who did 
not have access to Jewish 
education because their 
parents didn’t have either 
the economic capital or the 
social capital to become 
part of the established 
Jewish community. They 
couldn’t afford a seat in the 
synagogue, they couldn’t 
afford to send their children 
to congregational all-day 
or every-afternoon schools 
[which were among the few 
options for Jewish education 
when Gratz opened the 
Philadelphia Sunday school]. 
Sunday schools are really 
a very innovative solution 
to a problem of a lack of 
resources. 

You also write that 
the founders of these 
supplementary schools 
want to defend children 
against “predatory 
evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz 
described her goal when 
she created the first Sunday 
school. She was very, very 
worried about the Jewish 
kids who were not receiving 
any kind of Hebrew school 
education. She talks about 
Protestant missionaries and 
teachers who would go out 
onto the street ringing the 
bell for Sunday school and 
offering various kinds of 
trinkets, and Jewish kids 
would get kind of swept 
into their Sunday schools. 
There was a very concrete 
need to give Jewish children 
somewhere else to go. 
So Gratz and the people 
who created the first 
Hebrew Sunday school in 

“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of 
American Judaism,” says MSU Assistant Professor Dr. Laura Yares, 
author of the new book, Jewish Sunday Schools. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

