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.A cele-bration in 1884 of the one hundredth birthday of Moses Montefiore, pa-tron of Jewish settlement in Palestine and advocate for Jewry the world over,was made simultaneously into an occasion to honor Israel Brodsky.Fundsraised at the festivities were to be earmarked for Jewish settlers in Pales-tine.Israel Darewski, describing the event, added that although Brodsky andhis son Lazar had not yet actually donated to the cause, it was hoped thatthey would contribute a large sum (!).47 Hebrew writer Y.Y.Vaysberg alsovoiced the hope that Kiev s notables would hearken to the call to assist in set-tling the Land of Israel, just as many middle-class Kiev Jews were doing.48Some apparently did: internal memoranda within the Kiev provincial ad-ministration reveal knowledge of an 1885 meeting of both rich and poorJews at the home of merchant Moisei Vainshtein, a leader of the city s Jew-ish community, where 8,000 rubles were raised for the Love of Zion move- MODERN JEWISH CULTURES AND PRACTICES 159ment.49 Vainshtein s home was in Ploskaia, which indicates that he was abusinessman of a somewhat lesser order than Brodsky, Margolin, and theother grandees; this, however, did not hinder him from raising over doublethe sum raised at the meeting in 1884.An apocryphal story was told about an encounter between the pluto-crat Lazar Brodsky and the Zionist leader Mandel shtam, in Brodsky s of-fice.When Mandel shtam returned from the First Zionist Congress in 1897,he presented a report on the proceedings in a private meeting with some ofthe plutocrats.Brodsky asked him, If you like this plan so much, why don tyou go to Palestine yourself? Mandel shtam responded, You are now build-ing all these hospitals in Kiev why don t you be one of the first patients inthem? 50 Whether or not the story is actually true, it does provide insightinto the perspectives of Kiev s two most prominent Jewish leaders, each ofwhom took a very different approach to Jewish communal affairs.Whileboth men lived comfortable lives in Kiev and devoted considerable energy tobettering the lot of the Jewish masses, Mandel shtam saw no future for Jewsin Russia in an 1887 letter to a colleague in Berlin, he described himselfas without homeland; a mixture of Jew, Russian, and German and thuspoured all his energy into Zionism (and later Territorialism), while Brodskywas a classic liberal who believed that the tsarist government would eventu-ally grant equal rights to Russian Jews.51In 1894, Eliezer Friedmann, lamenting in Ha-melits that Jews no longerseemed to care about Hibbat Zion, took up the cudgel: the notables and greatJewish patrons of the city were especially to blame for the decline, apparentlybecause they had withheld essential financial support.52 He would later recallthat during his first years in Kiev, from 1893 to 1899, there had been almostno substantive Palestinophile activity in the city.53 This may have been anexaggeration, because other sources tell of meetings at the progressive prayerquorum (the forerunner of the Choral Synagogue), a two-hundred-strongvolunteer or member corps, and collections of hundreds of rubles.54 MosheRozenblat also recalled semi-clandestine Zionist meetings at Brodsky s syna-gogue as well as at the Rozenberg (Tailors ) Synagogue in Podol and, forthe intelligenty-professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like), inprivate homes.55 Sholem Aleichem was also very active as a Palestinophilepropagandist in the late 1890s; among his works was Der yudisher kongresin Bazel, a Yiddish version of a speech about the 1897 Zionist Congress thatMandel shtam had given in a number of Kiev prayer houses.56 Friedmannwrote that both Brodsky and Zaitsev were opposed to Hibbat Zion, and an 160 JEWISH METROPOLISanonymous article in Ha-melits in 1896 confirms that the movement hadonly had limited success in winning over the notables, in Kiev as elsewherein the empire.Exulting that Baron Gintsburg and Jacob Poliakov, leading fig-ures in Russian Jewry, were now members, the writer continued on a moresomber note: we can hope that the rest of the Jewish notables [atsilei yisra el],in Kiev and in the other cities, will not stand against the society forever. 57However, a published list of investors in the Jewish Colonial Bank in 1899reveals that Zaitsev had bought five hundred shares, more than anyone elsein Kiev, so perhaps his initial hostility turned into acceptance.58 Overall, itseems clear that general interest in the cause was declining in the 1890s, asanother Kiev observer wrote and as was the case throughout the empire.59Police harassment may have been another factor; archival documents re-veal that Mandel shtam, chair of the Kiev branch, denied any knowledge ofa Hibbat Zion organization in Kiev when questioned by the chief of police in1885.60 Mandel shtam himself wrote to a colleague in Vienna that official re-strictions were hampering the growth of the movement, but added that thecharacter of the Jews in southern Russia was also a problem, especially thoseof better means, who demanded immediate, concrete results.He also inti-mated that the Jews of the south were somewhat less energetic than those ofLithuania, where countless societies had already been organized.61In a speech on the Zionist Congress in London in 1900, Mandel shtamupbraided his fellow Zionists in Kiev, just as he had criticized the Zionistmovement in general at the congress: [As elsewhere,] we in Kiev have notdone one-tenth of that which we could have done.Other than ten or twelveenergetic individuals.everyone else slept, awakening only we shook themforcefully.Let every Zionist fulfil his duty.! 62 At home in Kiev, from theturn of the century on, Mandel shtam, together with Hillel Zlatopol skii, asuccessful businessman who was also a donor to Jewish causes and a He-braist, were kept busy as the heads of Russian Zionism s financial center (merkaz ha-kesafim), based in Kiev [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]