These forces elected Eli‘ezer Igel as chief rabbi of Czernowitz he preached in German and held his post from 1853 to 1892. The strengthening of a liberal middle class that inclined toward German language and culture was also reflected in communal life, which was controlled by representatives of the bourgeoisie who after 1850 supported reform and assimilation. This was a direct consequence of the increase in the number of Jewish pupils (from 3% in 1845 to 60% in 1905, of the total number of students enrolled in Czernowitz’s German high school) and university students (42% in 1903 of the total number of students enrolled in the German university, founded in 1875). They constituted the majority in the freelance professions and on newspaper editorial boards. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lotte Gottfried Hirsch) Students of the Hoffmann Gymnasium, Cernăuți, ca. It was therefore not by chance that parliamentary representatives of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, founded in 1850, were mainly Jews. The proportion of entrepreneurs who were Jewish reached approximately 90 percent after 1900. An attempt in 1843 to establish a bilingual school that offered German and Hebrew finally succeeded in 1855.Īfter being designated the capital of the new Habsburg crown province of Bucovina in 1849, Czernowitz enjoyed several decades of development, a process stimulated by the economic and political emancipation of Jews, which was completed after 1867. Although traditional schools ( Talmud Torahs and heders) continued to predominate, Jewish students attended German Jewish public schools that operated from 1789 to 1806, in addition to other educational institutions, including the city’s German high school, which was founded in 1808. As promoters of incipient capitalism, and given the absence of a local bourgeoisie, the Jews-who were craftsmen, merchants, moneylenders, builders, and real estate owners-identified with modernization trends and promoted German language and culture as a means of attaining social progress and acceptance. Economic progress and rapid urbanization of the Jewish community clearly affected its interaction with the surrounding environment. Nevertheless, in the following decades the Jewish population continued to grow.Īmong the outstanding rabbis who guided the community were Ḥayim Tyrer (ca. Seeking to limit immigration from neighboring areas, the authorities resorted to various repressive measures, ranging from compulsory fees to forbidding marriages and even endorsing banishment. In 1774, Austrian authorities, who had now occupied the town, recorded the highest concentration of Jews (468) in the entire district. (Left to right) Itsik Manger, Josef Lerner, S. A.

A group of Jewish writers with the Yiddish newspaper Tshernovitser bleter (Czernowitz pages), Cernăuți, 1930s.

Jewish brisk