By Yitzhak Graff, Staff Writer
Yeshiva University’s classic motto Torah U’Madda seems to be a little outdated for the current administration. With President Berman’s ascension, we got the five Core Torah Values to serve as a mission statement for the University. More recently, the Sy Syms School of Business has adopted the slogan Torah U’Business. Judgment for the quality of Syms’ new slogan aside, the formula of “Torah and…” has been around for quite a long time. This is the story of Torah and Rags.
The year was 1905 and the bitter cold January winds were already whipping the streets of New York. Most people would have tried to spend as much time inside as possible to stay warm. Charity groups, run by middle class immigrant women, would have been arranging regular shipments of coal to heat the apartments of their destitute immigrant sisters.
Packed into a small second story room at 156 Henry Street, were about 60 young adults. Two rows of shtenders facing each other lined the room. At each shtender stood an energetic young man, a bowtie adorning the collar of his white shirt, his short dress jacket accompanied by bowler hat, his body swaying back and forth to an internal rhythm. The sound of each youth discussing his studies with his partner would have been deafening to a passerby, but the young men themselves would have felt exhilarated, swimming through the sea of the Talmud.
The Yeshiva students were a mix of immigrants from eastern Europe who had attended Yeshiva there, and some American students who received their elementary Yeshiva education from Etz Chaim. None of these students were expected to pay tuition. RIETS paid for its students’ housing and clothing and provided a weekly stipend of $2 to $4 depending on their seniority to pay for food and other life expenses. In today’s money, that’s around $70 to $130 a week. All this money was collected through fundraising.
In February 1905, the Board of Directors was bringing in nearly enough money from fundraising to pay for all its expenses. They decided to cut the stipend program, opting to feed the students with a communal meal, which would be a more efficient use of the Yeshiva’s funds.
A large contingent of students approached the new policy with years of pent up frustration. They felt that the Yeshiva itself lacked even a standardized Judaics curriculum, and its secular curriculum consisted of high school students teaching middle school level English. This deficient curriculum was not producing any hirable graduates. This counterproductive method of education was defended by a faction on the board of directors who wanted to shelter the students from modern ideas. The students perceived this decision to end the stipend program as a drastic move to curtail the students’ freedom.
On a day in mid-February (unfortunately none of the sources preserve the exact date) at eleven in the morning, all the students shut their books “with a thump” and “declared themselves on strike.” After the directors threatened to start expelling all of the students on strike, the students sent a strike letter to the teglicher herald (Jewish Daily Herald) describing the purpose of their struggle. The letter was printed on February 24, 1905.
This letter was not the first critical description of the Yeshiva to be printed, but it was the first to catch people’s attention. The story of the plight of the mistreated Yeshiva students caught the public’s attention.
The Jewish Daily Herald, recognizing the public interest in this story, continued to report on updates. On February 28, the Jewish Daily Herald broke the story of the first casualty of the strike. Chaim Stiller had moved to the United States in January 1905 to complete his semicha in RIETS. When the Yeshiva discontinued its stipend program and was shut down by the strike, Stiller had no means to feed himself, being so new in the area he didn’t have friends or family to rely upon. To pay for his food he took up peddling, but the New York City winter could become deadly at night. A snow storm hit the city on the night of February 26, he was found frozen in the street in the morning of February 27.
The administration decided to back off. They agreed to end the communal meal policy and to restore the stipend program. The damage was done. Now the public and crucially some of the supporters of the Yeshiva knew that the curriculum was being misrepresented in advertisements. One such supporter from Reading, Pennsylvania, named Hillel Jablonski, wrote a letter to the editor of the Jewish Daily Herald, describing his frustration with the Yeshiva for failing not only to provide a proper education for its students, but also to provide them with basic life necessities.
The Yeshiva’s board of directors’ attempt to close the budget deficit only resulted in them getting publicly embarrassed by the student body. In search of a new source of revenue, they settled on collecting used worn-out clothes to sell on the rag market to generate income for the Yeshiva. The press, still annoyed at the Yeshiva for its behavior earlier in the year, took this opportunity to mock the Yeshiva.
The Jewish Daily Forward published the first article on the subject. They retold the story of the strike, and noted that the Yeshiva had recently put out a call for people to donate their old and worn out clothing. The Jewish Daily Herald came next with another article a month later. Both papers argued the market of rag collectors was already saturated. People without stable employment would go around the city collecting worn-out clothes to sell to the rag merchants, who would have them recycled to make new textiles. Both claimed that the Yeshiva was taking away business from these rag collectors, who were able to subsist off the money they made from collecting rags to sell to the rag merchants.
The Yeshiva’s rag campaign didn’t last more than a month, probably because it didn’t bring in that much revenue. The campaign provided the Yiddish press with the opportunity to coin the phrase “Teyre un Shmates,” or “Torah and Rags.” The strike that preceded it, was the first of three strikes that would slowly force the Yeshiva towards an administration that was more accommodating of secular studies, setting the stage for the development of Torah U’Madda.