Religion and Jewish education are not one and the same thing. The Jewish children in all the Western European countries receive a purely religious education, but they grow up like Gentiles because Judaism is not simply a religious attitude. It is much more than religion itself. Judaism is religion, ethics, customs, laws, a certain outlook upon life, and a certain attitude toward the phenomena of life. The Orthodox Jews of Frankfurt (Germany), who give their children a strictly religious education, and who themselves received a strict religious education, practical and theoretical, do not have a Jewish outlook upon life; they have a Gentile outlook. The pious Frankfurt Jews are a living demonstration of the fact that one can be very pious and a thorough assimilator [at the same time].

The Jewish children did not receive a purely religious education even in the 2old country. In a way, they did not receive a theoretical religious education at all. They learned everything they knew about Jewish religious life or the Jewish religion not at the Heder or Beth Medrosh [elementary and advanced Hebrew schools] but at home, from their parents, and from the Jewish environment. The children were taught, even in the most elementary Heder, the Pentateuch with the comments of Rashi, which means that they were given the fundamentals of a Hebrew education. Only a few of those children went further and studied any advanced material. They began to teach the boy the Talmud as soon as he became familiar with the Prophets, which means that he was taught literature--law, civil and religious--but he was not taught it as a religious textbook, in the pedagogical meaning of the term. The so-called Jewish religious education was invented by the assimilators who erased from the prayer book the words "Zion and Jerusalem," and claimed that Judaism was only a religion, a religion that could be reformed, to which one could adapt oneself.

What we want to bring out is this: The people who claim that we can give our children a purely religious education are either conscious assimilators or they are Jews who do not think, who do not know what they are talking about.

The old-fashioned Talmud Torah, where the child was prepared for Bar Mizvah, where religion and nothing else was instilled in him, is a purely religious institution, and, therefore, an institution that is of little value today. This institution had some sense to it in the old country because, after all, the child in the old country received his real Jewish education not in the Talmud Torah but at home. The old-fashioned, elementary Talmud Torah, which seeks to give the child a purely religious education only, is an absurdity in America where there is no such thing as a Jewish home, a Jewish family, or a Jewish atmosphere in the home. What sense is there to religious theory without religious practice? The child will be taught one thing at the Talmud Torah, but at home, with his parents, he will see something entirely different.

The Talmud Torah in America must give the Jewish child not only a religious but a general Jewish education--only in that way will he grow up to be a Jew, with a love for everything that is Jewish. The Hebrew language must occupy the most prominent place in such a Talmud Torah. If the child knows Hebrew, he will read Hebrew books, and if he reads Hebrew books he will remain a Jew. If he does not know Hebrew, he will not read Hebrew books, and he will not remain a Jew. In ninety-five cases out of a hundred, he will become a corrupter of Jewish culture.

There is an educational institution in Chicago which is a terrifying example of the uselessness of the old-fashioned, elementary Talmud Torah. At least twenty thousand children have passed through its doors during the thirty-five years of its existence. Had it educated Jews, there would now have been in Chicago twenty thousand pious and proud Americanized Jews, but there are not even a hundred of its former pupils of whom we have any cause to be proud. A few of the pupils of this Talmud Torah somehow obtained a higher Jewish education, but the great majority of them are lost to us. This Talmud Torah 5has implanted in many of them a hatred for Judaism. Had this Talmud Torah given its pupils a general Jewish education, we would have in Chicago today a generation of modern, Orthodox Jews.

We deem it our duty at this time, when an Educational Council is about to be organized, to call the attention of the leaders of the city to the dangers and harm of the so-called purely religious education and to the necessity of a general Jewish education so that every child who attends a Talmud Torah shall remain a Jew, true to his religion and true to his people.