In another advertisement accommodation and sustenance were offered for two deaf children in the apartment of Izrael Lichtenstein, the director of an elementary school for Jewish children in Łódź, who later gained fame as a politician.³⁰ A final example worth recalling is the rhyming Yiddish advertisement, which deplored the fate of the blind and promoted the use of an optician’s services:
In a world so vast, my child, beware,
When a poor man’s sight is lost in despair.
Others may possess riches and might,
But he dwells forever in eternal night.
To him, darkness becomes a divine reign,
Wealth and treasures hold no true gain.
So, my dear child, protect your precious eyes,
Preserve their strength, don’t let vision demise.
And if your sight begins to wane,
Don’t hesitate or dwell in vain.
Seek the aid that will keep your vision plenty,
Swiftly go to Nalewki 20.³¹[…]
Another reason why a child might have been kept at home was the lack of special educational institutions in the Kingdom. The first one was founded in 1904 by the Protestant (Evangelical-Augsburg) minority in Warsaw, followed in 1908 by the initiative of two Jewish women, Eugenia Lublinerowa and Dorota Zylberowa—educators, social activists, and pioneers of special education in Poland.⁴⁸
Their school, the Warsaw Institute for the Mentally [Delayed] (Warszawski Zakład dla Dzieci Małozdolnych), accepted children aged 6–14 of all genders and faiths, although this openness had its limits: those with severe mental [challenges] (‘idiots’) were excluded, as were epileptics. The establishment of the school garnered attention from both the Jewish–Polish and Polish press.⁴⁹
[…]
The […] ubiquity of medical discourse in the Jewish press can also be attributed to the high number of Jewish doctors and their involvement in medical societies. They were part of the socially engaged intelligentsia that led social campaigns to bring about progress by improving the health and hygiene standards of the population.
Since the 1860s, when Jews were granted full citizenship in the Kingdom, these institutions had an inclusive character and accepted Jewish individuals. As Aneta Bołdyrew summarises, ‘the medical societies enjoyed the best operating conditions of all the scientific organisations. They were somewhat less subject to censorship, enjoyed greater freedom of assembly than other intellectual circles, and brought together well-educated specialists.’¹³⁴
[…]
By placing particular emphasis on the education of the deaf and blind, as evidenced by the establishment and continuous funding of the Warsaw Institute for the Deaf–Mute and Blind (and similar institutions were planned in other cities),¹³⁸ state authorities directed public attention towards this specific group of individuals. The Institute served as a model institution, attracting great interest and support from both [gentile] and Jewish financial élites, who willingly made donations and participated in annual open examination sessions.
The media also took notice of the Institute, praising its work. Since it was the sole school for children viewed as disabled for a large part of the century, the education of the deaf and blind was regarded as a distinctive and captivating endeavour. It was also believed that such an educational effort would minimise the undesirable social separation and otherness of these children and that their vocational training would make them socially useful.
As you might have guessed, ableism was, unfortunately, present not only in gentile communities but also in Jewish ones (especially if they followed Herzlianism):
Despite frequent press coverage bemoaning the lack of institutions dedicated to the care of the mentally ill, personal engagement for the betterment of this group seems to have remained limited. For example, the Society for the Care of Poor, Mentally and Emotionally Afflicted Jews (Towarzystwo Opieki nad Ubogimi, Nerwowo i Umysłowo Chorymi Żydami) was an organisation that founded the ‘Zofiówka’ hospital for the mentally ill on the outskirts of Warsaw, in Otwock. As lamented in a 1912 press report:
…the Jewish population takes little interest in the society, as can be seen by the attendance at the recent general meeting held last Thursday. Of the society’s 1,216 members, only 13 showed up at the meeting. It is really sad that such a large institution enjoys so little interest among Varsovians.⁴¹
[…]
A similarly unfavourable setting for disability was provided by Zionist concepts, present in HaTsefira (from the late 1890s) and to some extent Haynt. They heralded the creation of the ‘New Jew’ and rejected the image of its opposite in the form of a weak Diaspora Jew. In this regard, Zionism
…harboured profound ambivalence about the disabled Jewish body and psyche: they represented the persecuted, wounded, and deeply unhealthy Jewish nation, and therefore merited concern and sympathy. At the same time, however, they were also the clearest example of the Jews’ degenerate state and therefore had to be done away with through the regeneration and transformation that Zionism promised.¹⁴³
Taking the broader perspective suggested by Natan Meir, with the advent of modernity, as ‘is almost universally the case of social outcasts’, people with disabilities and other marginals began ‘to play a fraught rôle as the symbolic Other for Jewish society, which projected onto them its anxieties about its perception in the eyes of the Christian world, the rapid impoverishment of […] Polish Jewry’.
Importantly, ‘Modernizing reformers and philanthropists were particularly concerned that large groups of marginal types, more visible to Christian society in the cities to which Jews were migrating in large numbers, might endanger the positive image of modern Jewry that progressives were attempting to cultivate.’¹⁴⁴ Facing external stereotypes and concepts on Jewish alleged moral degeneration and physical deformation, the Jews displaced these features ‘onto their destitute and disabled’.¹⁴⁵