Tag #147322 - Interview #83476 (Motel Meilakhs)

We had a Derek-сheder for junior students, who were only taught the Torah, and a Gemara-сheder for the seniors, after three years of studies. The Derek-сheder occupied a small room. All teachers were men with full beards, wearing kippot. All boys wore caps. All of us went to the сheder by five or six o’clock in the morning and were released for lunch at eleven-twelve. The school was not far from our homes. An assistant, we called him ‘beelfe,’ would take us home and back. I started to attend сheder at the age of five. I learned the alphabet from the Torah. From the first day I would sit down at a table, open the Torah, and study the letters. The Torah has 52 chapters, and each week we studied one of them. The following year we went through the same chapters with comments of Rashi [14]. Each year we studied the Torah: In the first year with one kind of comments, in the second year with another.

Then I passed on to Gemara-cheder. In the сheder for older children they studied the Talmud. [Gemara, a part of Talmud embracing the latest and detailed interpretations of principal laws of Talmud, Mishnah.] That school was located in a small room, which you entered through the kitchen without doors. There was a rough wooden table. Ten boys sat at this table with Talmuds, and the rabbi sat at the head of the table. We read and translated classical Jewish texts. That’s all we did. There were no breaks. If one needed to go to the toilet, he was let out in the street. There were no toilets in the settlement, so we did what we had to directly on the ground.