– Shulkult (Association for Education and Culture) – organisation affiliated
with the Right Poalei Tsiyon; these were secular schools, with classes held
in Yiddish, although much time was also devoted to the Hebrew language.
– Horev (for boys) and Bais Yaakov (for girls) – associated with the Agudat
Israel, party; it organised religious schools, where, in addition to religious
subjects, general subjects were taught in Yiddish.
– Yavne (the name refers to the famous Talmudic centre in ancient Judea)
was the educational organisation of religious parties of Mizrachi Zionists;
in these schools the Hebrew language was usually given much emphasis.
Other members of the patronage included teachers of pre-war public primary
schools for Jewish children, with Polish as the language of instruction
(the so-called szabasówki).
Relatively, most of the materials preserved in the Ringelblum Archive
on the topic of clandestine schooling in primary education comes from the
TSYSHO patronage.⁹ Ringelblum and his close associates were attuned to their
educational concepts; according to TSYSHO’s theoreticians and practitioners,
a school teaching in the mother tongue, which the children spoke at home and
knew best, provided an opportunity for the cultural advancement of working
classes who could not afford middle school (gimnazjum) and university.
In the Warsaw ghetto, TSYSHO was headed by Sonia Nowogrodzka,
teacher, athlete, member of the Bund leadership,¹⁰ and Shakhne Sagan
(Zagan),¹¹ leader of the Left Poalei Tsiyon.
9 See docs. 6, 8, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32, 46.
10 Sonia (Sheyne Gitl) Nowogrodzka (1893 or 1894–1942), Bund activist, teacher, and educator, founder of TSYSHO schools. In the ghetto she was an activist for the underground Bund and YIKOR, where she organised clandestine classes. Among other activities, she collected articles from Jewish writers to be published secretly by the Bund, in the underground Bund Central Committee. She died in Treblinka in the summer of 1942.
11 Shakhne Sagan (Zagan) (1892–1942), publicist, political and social activist, one of the leaders of Left Poalei Tsiyon, deputy chairman of TSYSHO schools and member of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists. After the outbreak of the war, he organised the Joint’s first soup kitchen at Zamenhofa Street 9. In the ghetto, he was one of the leaders of the underground and played a significant role in the organisation of civil resistance. As a representative of the Left Poalei Tsiyon in the school patronage of the TSYSHO, he was a co-organiser of clandestine classes, and from October 1941 – education in official primary schools in the ghetto. He was also a member of YIKOR and an associate of Oyneg Shabes, one of the co-organisers of the Anti-Fascist Bloc, one of the founders of ŻOB.
