Records of the ORT Vocational School (Technicum) in Vilna

The Society for the Promotion of Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews of Russia, known by its Russian acronym, "ORT," was founded by Jewish community members in St. Petersburg in 1880, and, after receiving official recognition in the Russian Empire in 1905, began to establish affiliated branches in other cities. An ORT Committee was established in Vilna (today, Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1918, at the end of the First World War. In 1920 the city of Vilna (Polish: Wilno) was incorporated into newly independent Poland.

The Jewish Vocational (Technical) School of ORT in Vilna, known as the Technicum, was founded by members of the Vilna branch of ORT in 1920, and opened in January 1921. The aim of the founders was to provide Jewish youth who had completed elementary school, or a portion of gymnasium, an opportunity to acquire vocational training and a path to a trade or profession, in a way that also fostered their general education and development.¹ One of the founders, engineer Israel Okun (1877-1941), served as the school’s director for the first three years of its existence. Mateusz (Matisyahu) Szrejber (or: Schreiber; born 1887), another engineer who had taught at the school since its founding, assumed the directorship in 1924, and remained in the post through approximately January 1940.

The task of the Technicum was to prepare its students to become mid-level technical specialists, between the level of the worker and the engineer. To this end it provided a thorough theoretical as well as practical education in the field of mechanics and technology. Graduates of the Vilna Technicum went on to become qualified assistants for engineers, managers of small industrial enterprises, foremen of divisions in factories, and technical draftsmen, among other such professional roles.

It should be noted that for Jews in interwar Poland, gaining admission to government-run vocational schools was difficult; the nation's resources for establishing such schools were insufficient and, in practice, Jewish applicants encountered discrimination.² According to figures published by the Polish Ministry of Education in 1938, Jewish students made up only 5.1% of the students in state-owned technical schools in Poland in the period 1934-1937, although Jews comprised 9.8% of the general population.³

Since the Vilna Technicum was the only Jewish technical school of its kind in Poland, Jewish youth from all parts of the country studied there. In 1935 Technicum director M. Szrejber wrote that 70% of the students at that time came from outside of Vilna and that every part of Poland was represented, except for the Poznań district and Upper Silesia.⁴ Concerning the size of the enrollment, Szrejber reported that the total number of students studying at the school had grown steadily in its early years, from 104 in 1923 to a peak of 238 in 1930, and then declined in the following few years, to a total of 144 in 1934.⁴ As of the end of 1932 the school had graduated approximately 300 students.⁵

The Technicum had two divisions: mechanical and electrotechnical.⁶ The course of study, at first envisioned as just two years, in view of the difficult financial circumstances of most of the families of the students, was before long stipulated as three years.⁷ Classes were taught in Yiddish. The tuition paid by students accounted for less than half of the school's budget. The school was subsidized by the ORT Central Committee in Warsaw, the Vilna Jewish Community Council, and the Vilna municipality.⁴

Initially headquartered at Wielka Pohulanka (Great Pohulanka Street) 18 and later, beginning in 1928, at Gdańska 3, the school was well equipped. In 1935 the facilities comprised two buildings, one of four stories and the other of three, with a total of 33 rooms, including large halls, technical drawing rooms, recreational rooms, and a variety of workshops and laboratories. From the beginning the school also maintained its own library, which, in 1935, housed over 1,500 volumes, focused on current technical literature, the greatest portion in German, then Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and English. In addition, a student committee organized the publication, in lithographic form, of a series of Yiddish-language textbooks authored by the school's teachers.⁸

Early on, the school sometimes used the rubric "Vilner yidishe politekhnishe kursn" (Vilna Jewish polytechnical courses), but by 1922 its name had been formalized as "Vilner yidisher tekhnikum" (Vilna Jewish Technicum; Polish: Wileńskie Technikum). Around March 1933, the school was required by Polish school authorities to change its name to "Vilner yidishe tekhnishe shul" (Vilna Jewish Technical School; Polish: Wileńska Zydowska Szkoła Techniczna). In 1938, in accordance with a new Polish regulation affecting vocational schools, the Technicum began a transition to meeting the more rigorous academic requirements of a lyceum, or upper-level gymnasium, and subsequently used the name "Mekhanisher litsey" (Mechanical High School/Lyceum; Polish: Liceum Mechaniczne).⁹

In late 1939, the Technicum apparently introduced a crafts/artisanal school division, known in Yiddish as the "hantverker-mitlshul" (Crafts/artisanal high school; Lithuanian: Amatų mokykla).¹⁰ A separate crafts/artisanal school had been run by the Vilna ORT Society during an earlier period, beginning in the mid 1920s, but had been disbanded sometime in the early 1930s for financial reasons.¹¹

School announcements of admission requirements through 1926 specifically refer to accepting both male and female students, and later announcements refer generically to pupils, without specifying gender;¹² however, in practice the enrollment appears to have been almost entirely male. In fact, in the mid to late 1930s, the Polish (although not the Yiddish) rendering of the school's name in its letterhead and stamp includes a reference to it as an all-male school, "Prywatna Męska Techniczna Szkoła Żydowska" (Private male Jewish technical school), and it was listed as such in the Vilna city directory.¹³ The minimum age of applicants was specified as 16 years through 1924, but was lowered to 15 years in 1925, and to 14 years in 1927.¹²

At the beginning of the Second World War, in late September 1939, Vilna was occupied by the Soviet Union. Subsequently, as a result of a mutual assistance treaty between the Soviet Union and Lithuania, Vilna was transferred to Lithuania, in late October 1939. The ORT Technicum was apparently closed for a time during this period, but reopened by November and at that point was offering special vocational courses for Jewish refugees in Vilna.¹⁴ For a while, the Jewish Refugee Aid Committee at the Lithuanian Red Cross in Vilna subsidized tuition for refugees, until May 1940.¹⁵

As of February 1940 the Technicum's correspondence with the Lithuanian Ministry of Education was carried on by a new director, J. Viršubskis, who apparently replaced Mateusz Szrejber in that post.

Following the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940, Vilna, along with the rest of Lithuania, was officially annexed to the Soviet Union, on 3 August 1940; it became the capital of the newly created Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The Lithuanian Ministry of the Interior moved to ban all non-communist cultural and religious organizations in July 1940, at the beginning of the Soviet occupation, and the ORT Society in Lithuania immediately petitioned the ministry to be allowed to continue its activities. After initially ordering the society's board to be replaced, the ministry nonetheless finally issued a resolution, dated 6 August 1940, to close the society, on the grounds that its activities were incompatible with state security.¹⁶ Among the extant records of the Technicum in the present collection, the latest dated item is correspondence from the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, dated 31 August 1940, received on 3 September, referring to the closure of the crafts school, and the dismissal of Director Viršubskis and the teaching staff, as of 1 September.¹⁷

On 24 June 1941 Nazi Germany occupied Vilna, and in September the Vilna Ghetto was established. Mateusz Szrejber, the longtime director of the Technicum, was a resident of the ghetto, and organized a vocational school there; one of the teachers working with him was engineer Józef Janow (born 1884), who had also been a longtime teacher at the Technicum.¹⁸ Szrejber and Janow both perished in the Holocaust.

References

Eck, Nathan (1947). "The Educational Institutions of Polish Jewry (1921-1939)." Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 3-32.

Szrejber, M. (1935). "Der Vilner Yidisher Tekhnikum fun ORT." In: Vilne: a zamlbukh gevidmet der shtot Vilne. Edited by Ephim H. Jeshurin. New York: Vilner Branch 367, Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle). pp. 313-321. Available online at www.archive.org.

World ORT in collaboration with the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum (2013). Exhibition catalog, Parengti gyvenimui: ORT Lietuvoje (Educating for Life: ORT in Vilnius). Available as a PDF file on the museum's website (jmuseum.lt/lt/kilnojamosios-parodos/i/249/parengti-gyvenimui.-ort-lietuvoje) and partially translated into English online at ortinlithuania.org.