Isaac Glass memory of Cheder

Most of the teachers were foreign but a few were English, though the teaching was all in English. We were taught how to write Yiddish as well as Hebrew, because you see, our people coming from a foreign land received letters regularly from Russia and if you could read them, you had some idea what it was all about.

I wouldn’t say the kids enjoyed Cheder, but we were so pushed into it we didn’t think anything of it. I think the worst part was having to go on Saturday afternoons after lunch. I went to shul three times a day, and when I came home from Shul on Shabbat I had to read again the whole of the Sidra of that particular week to my father – I had to sing it to him to prove to him that I knew it.

(Source: ‘The Best Days of Our Lives’, Interviews by Judy Simons, in Sheffield Jewish Journal, No. 105, April 1972, p. 10)