The last and largest group, the Russian Jews, the youngest army of the immigrants, is ultra orthodox, yet ultra radical; chained to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating every act of life, or going to the other extreme, and having “none of it”; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual labourers of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and does not lightly disclose itself to the outsider.
More broken into individualistic groups than the Austrians and Hungarians, they have the strongest racial consciousness, and perhaps are also the depository of the greatest Jewish genius. The synagogue is the centre of each provincial or village group gathered in some Ghetto and, being subject to no ecclesiastical law outside of itself, is thoroughly Congregational. These synagogues vary in size and untidiness as the services vary in monotony and disorder. Each man prays or chants as fast or as slowly, as high or as low, as he pleases. Naturally, the effect is not harmonious, neither is there much harmony in the administration of ecclesiastical affairs.
Rabbi, Cantor and Shochet (the official slaughterer) are usually out with each other and with various members of the congregation, and quarrels during service are not unknown. While the worship seems fervent, it is often spiritless, and only a small portion of the Russian Jewish population works seriously at the business of its organized religious life. The younger generation has much unsatisfied longing for the real spiritual life, and there are a few Jewish Endeavour Societies entirely apart from the synagogues, in which this spirit expresses itself. A still larger number of the young people have slowly but surely drifted into complete antagonism to the faith of their fathers, and here lies the great conflict as well as the great problem.
Nothing in the whole story of immigration is so pathetic as this growing breach between the old and the new; this ever widening gulf which is not being bridged.
The Ethical Culture Society has a hold, although not a very vital one, upon a small number; and here and there one or the other of the young people drifts into a Christian church, but this makes no serious impression upon the mass.