|
| ||
|
The Yiddish schools in America were always supplemental schools, meeting several times a week after public schools. This was a major difference between the Yiddish schools in Poland which were, if chosen by the parents, the primary day school of the child, and the Yiddish schools in America which never developed a single Yiddish day school. One graduated the folkshul, the equivalent of sixth grade, at age 12, then proceeded to mitlshul, middle school, for several years once or twice a week, and then went on to a upper level Seminary. On the political spectrum of the Yiddish cultural world in the 1920s and 1930s, the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute and its schools, and the Yiddish camp, Camp Boiberik, were more to the right, with less emphasis on socialism and more stress on the humanistic values that can be learned from traditional Judaism and applied to the modern Jewish experience. Founded in 1918, the Institute lasted until the 1970s, and was a national movement which attained its greatest support in the 1930s. The Workman's Circle [Arbeter-Ring] was a socialist fraternal organization founded in 1900 which still exists today. Its secular school system began soon after the Sholem Aleichem Folk shuln. In the late 1920s, many, if not most, of the shuln broke off and eventually formed the leftist Arbeter Ordn Shuln. Yet the Workman Circle survived the division and became the largest of the shuln networks. Their socialist agenda faded in the 1950s, and they, like the Sholem Aleichem schools, stressed the postive aspects of Yiddish language and culture. 
|
