Tag #154685 - Interview #94472 (Laszlo Ringel)

I went to cheder in the neighboring village at the age of 4. My father took me to the cheder when going to work, and then I returned home with other Jewish boys after classes at 3-4 pm. We took lunches from home with us. Local boys had lunch at home. The rebe spoke Yiddish to us, and I only spoke Hungarian, but by the middle of the first academic year I picked up sufficient Yiddish. Perhaps, the method of stick teaching in the cheder helped. I had never been beaten at home. My parents didn’t allow me to go play in the street for punishment. The rebe had a bamboo stick to punish the boys. In the first year we studied the Hebrew alphabet. In the 2nd year of studies we began to read prayers in Hebrew and translate them into Yiddish. In the 3rd form we began to study the Torah. We read chapters from the Torah, translated them into Yiddish and then discussed what we had read. When I turned 7, my parents sent me to the Slovak school in our village and I had to stop my studies in the cheder. It was a Roman Catholic school. The pupils greeted their teacher saying ‘Glory to Jesus Christ!’ in Latin, a traditional Roman Catholic greeting. [Laudeter Jesus Christus] Jewish children didn’t have to attend the religious classes. I finished my 1st form in this school, and went to the 2nd form of a Slovak school in Uzhgorod. I rode a bicycle to school and later to a grammar school. We also had classes on Saturday. There were no Orthodox Jews in Onokovtse, so nobody cared that I rode a bicycle on Saturday. However, I had to ride across Nizhneye Domanintse to get to Uzhgorod, and there were Orthodox Jews in this village that were angry that a Jewish boy rode a bicycle on Saturday. So, I came home on Friday evening, had dinner with the family and rode back to Uzhgorod to my aunt Karolina where I stayed overnight to go to school on Saturday and returned home on Saturday evening. On Friday evening Karolina’s husband went to the synagogue of neologs near the market in Uzhgorod and sometimes took me with him. Now it is an apartment house, but there still can be seen a big relief mogendovid [magen David] under the roof on it.

My parents knew that I needed to know the state language well to continue my education in a grammar school. So I went to the 4th form to a Czech school in Uzhgorod. After finishing my 4th year I went to the Czech 8-year school in Uzhgorod.