Institutionalization and modernization of charity in the Jewish communities of Moravian and Silesian towns
Abstract
From their very beginning, the emancipating Jewish communities paid attention to the construction of all ‘three pillars of the world’. The first two, namely the Torah and the services, seemingly prevailed over the third one, compassion, although it was for the purpose of religious education of children and for common religious services that the Jewish religious associations were set up.
A thorough research into the situation of Jewish communities has shown, however, that the question of representation was probably more important. While the Torah found representation in its scrolls or in the Jewish School building and the second pillar was represented in the synagogue and liturgical objects, the building of the third pillar took on the form of a kind of destruction: liquidation of sickness, burying the dead in the earth, or fighting poverty.