Kehilla (modern)

For other uses, see Kehilla (disambiguation).

The Kehilla (pl.: Kehillot) is the local Jewish communal structure that was reinstated in the early twentieth century as a modern, secular, and religious sequel of the qahal in Central and Eastern Europe, more particularly in Poland's Second Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Kingdom of Romania, Lithuania, Ukrainian People's Republic, during the interwar period (1918–1940), in application of the national personal autonomy.

Unlike the ancient Qahal/Kehilla, abolished in the Russian Empire by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844,[1] the modern Kehilla council was elected like a municipal council, with lists of candidates presented by the various Jewish parties: Agudat Yisrael, the religious and non religious Zionists, but also the marxist Bundists and Poalists, the liberal-minded secularist Folkists, et cetera. The initial project, as submitted by the Jewish delegations to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was to constitute a National Jewish Council for each state, out of representatives from the various kehilla councils, like the former Council of Four Lands.[2][3]

  1. ^ Henry Abramson, The end of intimate insularity: new narratives of Jewish history in the post-Soviet era, in Acts of Symposium “Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia,” at Sapporo, Japan, on July 10–13, 2002
  2. ^ Stopnicka Heller, Celia (1993). On the edge of destruction: Jews of Poland between the two World Wars. Wayne State University Press. p. 383. ISBN 978-0-8143-2494-3. Retrieved 2009-12-01.
  3. ^ Gitelman, Zvi Y. (2003). The emergence of modern Jewish politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe. Univ of Pittsburgh Press. p. 275. ISBN 978-0-8229-4188-0. Retrieved 2009-12-04.