חינוך ולימודי הנשים

There in Khoms, we used to study in Italian. At eight o’clock we would go to school and study until twelve. At twelve, we would go home and have lunch, and at two we used to go to the synagogue to study with Rabbi Frīža Zwārəz, who used to teach us. There were approximately two hundred pupils studying the Torah, the hymns and everything. He taught us, he also used to hit us, with the thing, the stick. He used to say to me like this, take a chalk and go the thing, the blackboard. Write paōlē-xa [your deeds]; I would write it with a wāw, and he would take my head and bang it on the blackboard until it swelled. He said: “Paōlē-xa has the shewa kamats, not the holam!” Do you understand? So, we learned a lot of grammar, I came here to Israel and I was terrific in grammar, everybody was scared of me. I used to say to them: “Listen, don’t we say that everyone who keeps the Shabbat, the Shabbat will keep him?” Here we learned until we grew up, while girls until they were twelve, twelve years was enough, they no longer went to the synagogue. They stayed home, and every girl stayed, stayed with her mother until she grew up, she would not leave the house, how did they call her? Guarded, they would call her guarded, that is locked.