At home, Litvaks spoke Yiddish. Learning Hebrew was unusual. Imagine if today we decided to teach our children to speak Latin! It would seem like an impossible mission. Some teachers were inspired by the dream of Eretz Israel. It was the restored Promised Land where everyone would one day speak Hebrew.
In Dusetos, one such teacher was Yudel (in Hebrew, Yehuda) Slep. He didn’t allow children to speak Yiddish at school. If they said any non-Hebrew word, they had to pay a fine.
The money collected went to the Jewish National Fund. This is an organization that, since 1901, has supported the idea of rebuilding Israel. Jews around the world donated to this fund through small blue collection boxes, known as pushkes. With the money raised, they purchased land and planted trees in the Land of Israel. The contributions from Dusetos stood out as unusually generous.
Teacher Yehuda inspired his students with a special love for Zionism and for Israel. Thanks to his influence, many Jewish families from Dusetos managed to emigrate to Palestine before the war. Others left for South Africa, the United States, or South America.
Jews from Dusetos were known among Litvaks for their excellent Hebrew: their teachers had instilled in them a strong command of grammar and a pure pronunciation, free from the typical accent of Lithuanian Jews.
The teacher himself did not emigrate to Palestine. He stayed so that more children here could learn about the Promised Land and grow to love it.
Yehuda and his wife had four children (possibly). Only one, Gershon (Gershke), survived the Holocaust. He later lived in Vilnius and, during Soviet times, wrote letters to his friends in Israel in beautiful Hebrew. Gershon’s story is very complicated and deeply sad, perhaps someday it too will be told. As for how teacher Yehuda died, I don’t know. I think, no-one does.
In his letters, Gershon wrote about his lost childhood, a youth wrapped in mourning, and about how generations would pass and no one would remember them or their ancestors.
So, Gershon, that’s not true. We remember.
This story is retold from the book There Was a Shtetl in Lithuania. Dusiat Reflected in Reminiscences, edited and compiled by Sara Weiss-Slep (Israel, 1989). The original photos come from the same source. The image of the blue box is from Wikipedia.
Litvak Shtetls 