THE CITY OF KEIDAN: An Historical Memoir by Boruch Chaim (Alter) Cassel

Napoleon's war with Russia in 1812 caused great havoc in Keidan, because the French and Russian armies marched through the city repeatedly. When the French occupied Keidan they turned the Calvinist church into a horse stable.

The Jews of Keidan supported the Russians, as did most Lithuanian Jews, and were overjoyed with Napoleon's defeat. On the other hand, the Catholic Poles and their religious leaders were strong supporters of the French and were infuriated with the Jews.

After the war life returned to normal.

Mendelssohn, 1729-86, was a Berlin philosopher who founded a movement for the cultural assimilation and enlightenment of Jews. The movement, called Haskala, flourished in the 19th century.

The great struggle that was raging elsewhere in Lithuania between the Hassidim and the Misnagdim did not seem to affect Keidan. The Jewish community was very pietistic and its religious leaders saw to it that no innovations were introduced. If any hint of Moses Mendelssohn's reforms did manage to reach Keidan, every effort was made to sweep them away.

A journal of an artisan's group of those days provides us with some interesting insights:

On the first day of Rosh Hashana, a tailor appeared in the synagogue wearing a velvet yarmulke. This greatly disturbed the worthies sitting in their prestigious places on the east wall,

The east wall, or misrakh-vant, is the area of the synagogue where persons of high status customarily sit.

since they believed they were the only ones entitled to wear such headgear. Immediately after the holiday the tailor was summoned to the kahal, where he was ordered to bring a fine of ten pounds of candles and to turn in his yarmulke. This punishment deeply offended all the workmen in Keidan, who had been united in their guilds for a long, long time. So on the first day of Succos not only tailors but also shoemakers, hatters and other artisans, came to services in their new velvet yarmulkes, fur hats and log sating coats with belts, all dressed up like the property owners at the Eastern wall, and even much handsomer.

On the second day of Succos they repeated this, just to spite the Keidan eastern-wall bigshots. This, however, cost the impertinent workmen of Keidan very dearly. On the very next day, Prince Czapski's guards rounded up all the workmen into the central square and whipped every one of them.

A shameful thing like this had never happened in all the history of the Keidan Jewish community. Under the Radzivills, Jews had become accustomed to being treated equally as free citizens of equal status. Enlightened Calvinists, the Radzivills never inflicted corporal punishment upon the Jews. If a Jew sometimes had an argument with a kahal official - let's say for insulting him by not inviting him to the community banquet - and took revenge by informing, telling the Radzivills that the official had made an obscene gesture as the Duke rode through the city. The Radzivills would punish the official by expelling him and his family from Keidan. But still, they never whipped him.

As free and equal citizens of Keidan who were used to more privileges than other Jews in Lithuania and Poland, the artisans were very bitter at the abuse they had suffered from their own brothers. This unified them, and they declared a holy war against the Jewish aristocrats. The battle was engaged in the Russian courts, which under Alexander I were not too unfriendly toward Jews, and were accustomed to hearing complaints by the lower classes against community bigshots. But the Keidan Jewish community leaders had funds with which to bribe the government councils, and the deliberations dragged on for years, costing the aristocrats as well as the artisans' guilds thousands of rubles.

One day, news came that the Tsar's brother, Constantin Pavlovitch, military commander over Poland and Lithuania, would soon be passing through Keidan. The artisans decided to give Pavlovitch a petition describing their unfair treatment in the government judicial councils. However, word of their plans leaked out. Minutes before Constantin's arrival, the petitioner, document in hand, was provoked into an argument by another workman, who had been hired for this purpose, and the police arrested them both for disturbing the peace. Constantin passed through without ever seeing the document, and the city fathers prevailed once again.

The artisans decided to carry out their own justice, and began to intercept and beat their enemies when they passed through woods or other out-of-the-way places. Eventually, the kahal decided to make peace with the artisans and sent an emissary inviting negotiations. The artisans presented the following conditions: First, the yarmulke and belted robe should be admissible garb for Jews of all classes. Secondly, whenever a dispute was heard in the rabbinical court, the judges had to include one workingman. The kahal itself also would have to include an artisan. The kahal agreed to these conditions and peace ensued.

The artisans' group founded their own synagogue, the Eyts Chaim, as a consequence of their long struggles, where they had their own east wall and their own rabbinical aide. The dayan,or rabbinical aide, was obliged to pray in the synagogue three times daily, to study the book of laws and customs, Chaye Adam, with the congregants between afternoon and evening prayers during the week, and to study a translation of the weekly Sabbath Torah reading with them on Friday, after the evening meal and on Saturday after afternoon prayers. The stipend of the rabbinical aide came from 18 kopecks, which each elementary pupil was obliged to pay over three years. Twelve of these kopecks were allocated to the community and six to the rabbinical aide. From that time on the equal rights of workingmen in Keidan were never again violated. At times there arose individual examples of important scholars and pietists among the workingmen¹¹of Keidan.

Some 20 years after these events, Eliahu Vilner, the richest tailor in Keidan, built a small synagogue near the Chaye Adam synagogue for the use of artisans and butchers.

The Eyn Yakov is a popular book of Talmudic morality tales.

The main book of study here was the Eyn Yakov.

One year, the same Eliahu Vilner, a childless man who was very influential in the community, was able to purchase the right of opening the ark of the Torah for the closing prayer of Yom Kippur at the large synagogue where the city elders prayed. Thereafter, for the remainder of his life, he would go to the large synagogue every year to open the ark for the closing prayer at Yom Kippur. He and his wife both lived into an advanced old age.

In the 1820's there lived in Keidan a man named Arye Leib (Leon) Mandelstam,

Leon Mandelstam, a noted educator and Bible scholar, whose translation of the five books of the Hebrew Bible into Russian was published in 1862.

who, by the pious standards of the city, was considered a freethinker, and hence was not able to make a living there. In 1844 he became the first Russian Jew to obtain a degree in philology from the St. Petersburg university. Eventually he was appointed by a minister of education, one Uvarov, to administer a government plan for educating the Jews of Russia.

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