Teaching Jewish Girls in the Shtetl!

Greiding, Ukraine c. 1900
Binyoumin Kreplach and the class of girls
The girl, top row second from the left is my grandmother Rissel the Ruta (the readhead!) and this picture was taken in Gorodok/Horodok, Ukraine where she was born around 1888. The teacher's name was Binyoumin Kreplach who gained this name having once expressed his yearning for yesterday's kreplach one Yom Kippur afternoon. Small town's don't easily let you live these things down. It seems this didn't spoil the shidduch because the little boy to the left of Mr. Kreplach is his son.

Rissel Schwartz
official ID photo
My grandmother Rissel Schwartz left the shtetl for Odessa where she lived with cousins and studied in a Gymnasium which as I understand was a secondary school, like a high school. I guess she must have learned enough from Binyoumin to hold her own in the school. She was there during the revolution but immigrated along with her brother to the United States around 1922.

I would love to have asked her questions about her childhood and education but unfortunately she passed away a few months before I was born and I am named for her.


From Israel, With Love!