Confirmation education from the old world to the new: A 150 year follow-up

The dearth of research on the history of American Jewish education has been somewhat redressed by Graff’s recent panoramic survey, which provides the broad framework for others to fill in.2 His book contains a single mention of the confirmation ceremony, the one instituted by the European-born and trained Orthodox rabbi Bernard Illowy, as reported in Illowy’s son’s 1914 biography of his father. Illowy targeted confirmation to those mid-nineteenth century Jewish children not enrolled in all day Jewish schools: “He introduced the confirmation on Shabuot … six months before Shabuot the class began its work, instruction in Bible history, in the tenets of the faith and its ceremonials, in the ceremonial laws and in the prayers. Boys who had not learned to lay Tephillin (phylacteries) were taught to do so and were impressed with the necessity of doing so every morning.”3 On this innovation, Graff comments: “[Illowy] adopted the confirmation ceremony that had been introduced by religious reformers. Consistent with the American pattern of equal educational opportunity for children of both sexes, it appears that the only gender-based curricular difference in the training he provided was in the matter of teaching boys to don tefillin.”