Tag #138569 - Interview #78499 (Bernat Sauber)

From 6am to 7am I used to got to the cheder, and the first thing we did was praying, and this lasted half an hour. In the next half an hour we learned the weekly pericope. We prayed just like at the synagogue, there was a chazzan and the others followed him. There was no schoolbag at that time, we just tied a wire around the books, we had two books or so, and at 7am we went to the school because teaching began, and lasted until 12am-1pm. In the afternoon we went home, had dinner and then we went again to the cheder and were there until 6-7pm. Children learned then 7-8 hours a day, that was mandatory. And usually every family followed these rules. There were teachers specially trained for it, called melamedim. Of course, the comment of the Talmud wasn't at the level they used to do it in the yeshivah. There weren't small desk like we had in school, we only had a long table. At the head of the table was the melamed, the teacher, and we, the children were sitting in front of him, in line. Each of us had a small booklet. Each year the weekly pericope, the 52 verses of the Torah, was edited in Kolozsvar. This included the Torah, the Targum, that is, the Torah translated into Aramaic, and under it, the Rashi comments. This went on for years. We learned the same thing each year, over and over again. I, for instance, had three editions of the pericope, and they were all identical. I remember they cost 3 lei, and it had the format of a larger copy-book.