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.)46 These moves were significant, set-ting a long-term precedent for Jewish charity in Kiev: Jewish philanthropywas to have a political as well as a humane goal, and would exemplify thebest of Russian Jewry by illustrating their willingness to live in peace along-side their fellow citizens.More prosaically, providing for Christians helpedavoid the appearance of insularity, an important goal for a new Jewish com-munity that was small but growing and whose members interacted on a dailybasis with non-Jewish businessmen, merchants, and bureaucrats.Brodsky smove also points up the impact that Kiev s restrictions on Jewish settlementmay have had on would-be philanthropists, since they would have wantedto avoid the appearance of attracting illegal Jews to the city.The Jewish Welfare Committee of KievExamining two cases of Jewish communities founded at the beginningof our period affords us the opportunity to follow the evolution of communalstructures and governance from their very inception.In both St.Petersburgand Kiev, Jewish notables came to lead the community.This was not surpris- THE FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNAL LIFE 69ing given that under the policy of selective integration, first-guild merchantswere the earliest to be allowed to settle in localities of restricted Jewish settle-ment.In the capital, the Jewish communal governing board was elected, ifonly by a limited group of merchants and graduates of institutions of highereducation.47 Because of the complex history and status of Jewish rights andrestrictions in Kiev, however, the governing board there was not elected orappointed but rather was self-selected, and came to govern the communityby fiat.As far as the law on Jewish settlement in Kiev could be clearly in-terpreted (and much effort was put into such interpretation over the years),the only Jews who enjoyed full residence privileges there and were not re-stricted to the neighborhoods of Ploskaia and Lybed were first-guild mer-chants.Thus, they were the natural candidates for members of a communalgoverning board.Moreover, it was only logical that a welfare board be selected from theJewish elite, since the law stipulated that local authorities consult with  pros-perous and settled Jews in managing the korobka.As the governor of Kievprovince wrote in 1890,  these individuals, by virtue of their social andproperty status, represent a sufficient guarantee of reliability. 48 The fact thatsome of these prosperous Jews were members of Kiev s city council madethat move all the more natural.49 (It did not, however, seem natural to allobservers of Russian Jewry; some antisemites decried the  tyrannical anddespotic Jewish leadership that, in their eyes, kept control over the Jewishmasses with an iron fist, inculcating in them hatred toward Russia.)50Yet it is likely that the authorities had other motives for sanctioningcommunal governance by the elite in leading communities such as Kiev,St.Petersburg, and Odessa.As we have seen, the Russian government orat least certain bureaucrats who thought along similar lines was interestedin shaping an acculturated Jewry that would be integrated into Russian so-ciety.In their eyes, members of the Jewish elite, who spoke Russian at home,interacted with non-Jews in business and social circles, and practiced a mod-ernized, German style of Judaism, were just the right individuals to be gov-erning communal affairs and deciding priorities.These, then, were the menwho eventually constituted the Representation for Jewish Welfare, as thegoverning board came to be known.It is not an easy task to reconstruct the history of the Representation forJewish Welfare, but archival documents, press reports, and several publica-tions of Kiev s Jewish Hospital allow us to trace a sketchy outline of its originsand development.The predecessor of the Representation, the Jewish Welfare 70 THE EARLY YEARSCommittee, was originally established to deal exclusively with the affairs ofKiev s Jewish Hospital (in contrast to St.Petersburg, where everything beganwith a synagogue governing board).51 The hospital was the city s first andmost prominent Jewish institution, and was tended to with great care by theJewish elite.The revenues from the kosher meat tax in Kiev which was notformally a korobka but a form of reimbursement to the city for the incomelost after the abolition of the Jewish hostels where Jews had been requiredto stay when visiting the city before 1861 originally went entirely towardhospital expenses, and were thus administered by the Hospital Committee.Several later documents referred to a decision of the city council of August 4,1875, assigning the responsibility for allocating the kosher excise revenuesfor the entire Jewish community to the Hospital Committee.For example, The representatives of the Jewish community [assigned] to deal with thekorobka should be the members of the Jewish Committee, which was origi-nally confirmed by the City Council on 4 August 1875 for Jewish Hospital af-fairs ; .General management of all matters of Jewish welfare falls on thelocal  Jewish Committee, confirmed by the Kiev City Council on 4 August,1875. 52However, the minutes of the city council show that the committee estab-lished was only to deal with hospital affairs; it was not for general communalgovernance.The fourth point discussed by the council on that day stipulatedonly  that the administration of the hospital and the management of all hos-pital affairs be under the authority of the local Jewish merchants, elected by amajority of the city council, and that the revenues assigned from the korobkafor the maintenance of the Jewish Hospital be transferred to its control. 53Apparently, because most of the kosher excise went toward the hospital, itwas understood that the Hospital Committee, in allocating revenues for thehospital, would also take care of distributing the balance of funds to Kiev sother Jewish institutions.54 Thus, the Hospital Committee came to be knownas the  Jewish Welfare Committee or simply the  Jewish Committee [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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