The Maccabaean

NUMBER of earnest and intelligent young men and women thoroughly familiar with the conditions prevailing in the Jewish community of Chicago and deeply imbued with the desire to provide adequately for these conditions have organized The Chicago Hebrew Institute. This institution will offer instruction in language, literature, and history, in various practical arts and sciences, provide for moral and spiritual culture, afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and physical exercise, and in general serve as a power for the social, civic and intellectual uplifting of the people.

It is realized that the time has come when such an institution is an absolute necessity. The Jewish community has been increasing in number by natural growth and immigration and with this growth has come a concentration, especially in one portion of the West Side. This very fact of concentration, however, permits of that harmony of action which is necessary in meeting the particular needs of a locality. These needs themselves originate primarily from the congestion in one portion of a city of a population foreign in origin, without superabundant means and able to retain because of its homogeneity, customs, habits and, to an extent, speech, differing from those prevalent in the general population.

Congestion of population, moreover, brings with it certain unavoidable evils, particularly lack of opportunity for phy-

sical development and proper care of the body; and recreation and social life are hampered, too, because of crowded homes and streets and want of suitable social halls, gymnasiums or open space. Almost forced to leave the cramped quarters of the home to seek diversion and entertainment, it is not surprising that the crowded street, the dance or music hall of harmful character usually with bar attached, the low grade theatre or cheap vaudeville, to mention no worse places, offer fatal attraction to young people denied natural, wholesome, outlet for their energy and spirits.

Morality and religion, too, suffer from the new condition of life of the Jewish immigrant. The children quickly absorb the language, customs and ideals of the new country. The parents are slower to do this and some never succeed. They seem foreign, strange, old-fashioned, and often tyrannical because of their insistance on their old authority and supremacy in the household. Add to this that often the children are the main, if not the sole support of the family, and the way is open for a complete casting- off of parental authority and with it a denial of the binding power of the old religion and its morality, at least in the forms observed by the elders. The difference in point of view, the reversal of the economic relationship, the denial of the authority of the old forms of religion, the natural antagonism between the Russian and the American types of civilization—all tend to a separation of inter-