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. 85 It is thus no surprise that two years later, in 1893,the department of spiritual affairs corresponded with officials in Kiev aboutthe possibility of abolishing that city s Jewish Welfare Committee and theJewish Cemetery Supervisory Administration.86At about the same time, the new governor-general, Lieutenant-GeneralCount A.P.Ignat ev, argued that Jewish charitable associations filled an im-portant need in the Jewish community and that existing official welfare in-stitutions could never take on the extra burden should their Jewish counter-parts be abolished.Ignat ev nonetheless admitted that most of the Jewishsocieties remained  inaccessible to government supervision and frequentlygoverned by individuals pursuing narrowly nationalist and sometimes il-legal goals. 87 His ambivalence about the need for separate Jewish insti-tutions points to the continuing inconsistency in official policy about Jewishintegration into Russian society: Jewish isolation needed to be eliminated soas to do away with the deleterious influence of Jewish separatism on Rus-78 THE EARLY YEARSsian society, yet the abolition of restrictions and independent Jewish insti-tutions would inevitably mean an influx of Jews into Russian institutions ofall kinds a proposition that made most officials very uncomfortable, giventhe widely accepted understanding that the  native population needed pro-tection from the Jews.Moreover, as an exchange in 1903 between interiorminister V.K.Plehve and finance minister S.I.Witte about a proposed VilnaJewish workhouse illustrates, the government regarded Jewish poverty as athreat to the very well-being of the empire, and Jewish welfare institutionsas crucial in keeping the dissatisfaction and hostility caused by that pov-erty to a minimum.At the same time, the government could not be seen tobe granting  special privileges to Jews by allowing them to establish largenumbers of Jewish institutions.88 A compromise the government could livewith was the coopting of Jewish communal welfare into the mechanism ofthe state itself, which would ensure official oversight of Jewish activitieswhile keeping the state from having to take over the day-to-day adminis-tration of Jewish welfare institutions.This arrangement was, in the govern-ment s eyes, particularly suited for a city like Kiev, whose administratorswere uneasy about its rapidly growing Jewish population and did not feelit proper for large numbers of independent Jewish institutions to take rootthere.(Their ambivalence and inconsistency on these matters is pointed upby the official removal of the Jewish Hospital from the administrative struc-ture of the Kiev Philanthropic Society in 1891.In this case, a major Jew-ish philanthropic institution was actually excluded from the purview of abody with quasi-official status and granted independence presumably be-cause it was no longer deemed appropriate or feasible for such a large andvisibly Jewish institution to be officially associated with a nominally Chris-tian establishment.)89In another memorandum of 1893, the governor-general warned that itwould be counterproductive to ban all Jewish participation in the allocationof excise revenues, since alienating Jews from welfare affairs would lead totheir ceasing charity work altogether or organizing charity independently,without any government oversight at all.90 His prediction was not fulfilled.As we shall see, the city s takeover of the Jewish Welfare Committee did littleto improve the delivery of services or assistance to the city s Jews, and thusactually added to the existing resentment of governance by the plutocrats.Inthis way, it may have served along with the 1897 model charters law, fa-cilitating the creation of voluntary societies throughout the empire to en-courage the establishment of myriad new Jewish associations in Kiev. THE FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNAL LIFE 79At exactly the same time that the Representation for Jewish Welfare wasbeing established, new regulations were decreed for the elections of syna-gogue boards.As in the case of the communal governing board, Kiev wasto join St.Petersburg as both a test case and a model for Russian Jewry.Thepositions of elder and treasurer, corresponding to responsibilities in tradi-tional synagogue governance, were abolished and replaced by  membersand  alternates, terms more familiar to the world of voluntary associationsthan traditional religious bodies.Moreover, a voting requirement was intro-duced, limiting the franchise to those paying at least 10 rubles a year in dues,a high sum that for the most part restricted voting to merchants.91 Most im-portantly, in locations outside the Pale of Settlement boards governing com-munal matters (dukhovnye pravleniia) were no longer permitted; only boardsregulating the financial affairs of a synagogue (khoziaistvennye pravleniia)were allowed.92 In effect, all communal self-governance was expropriatedby the government, leaving the Jewish community to govern itself solely onthe level of the synagogue and even here its responsibilities were limited tothose of a financial nature.But restricting participation in the synagogue was also cause for ambiva-lence among some officials, this time about the power of the Jewish elite overits poorer coreligionists.As we have seen, bureaucrats at the Ministry of Jus-tice were concerned that powerful Jews not be allowed to continue to holdpower and exert their harmful influence on the Jewish masses.This attitudeprobably stemmed from the widely held conception among bureaucrats andRussian nationalists that Jewish figures of authority used their control ofJewish institutions to inculcate hostility toward the Russian state and societyin the Jewish masses.93 The newspaper Kievlianin had long expressed concernabout the oppression of the Jewish poor at the hands of wealthy Jews whocontrolled the Jewish community.94 A memorandum from the governor-general s office to the Ministry of Interior brought this question to bear onthe issue of synagogue board elections: while the authorities in St [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]