The Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project presents a portrait of a prolific writer and Jewish thinker, through the lens of oral history. In this segment, we explore Solomon Simon’s shifting relationship to religious practice and education throughout his life.

Solomon Simon was born Shlomo Simonovich in a shtetl in White Russia, now Belarus. At 13, he went to his first of several yeshivas in Poland. He was brilliant by all accounts, but his studies were interrupted by the threat of the mandatory draft to the Russian army. He fled from Russia to escape his service, and came to the United States.

In America, Simon moved away from his religious upbringing. While he had proven himself as a scholar of the religious texts, he wanted to define a secular Yiddishism in the American context—separate from what he considered trivial moralism and obsolete faith. He raised his three children without a traditional religious education, and constructed for them a new Judaism that kept traditions without a faith-based backing. His children remember this rejection of the concepts of God, ritual, and belief.

At the same time, he never abandoned his early goal of synthesizing what was good about Judaism with modern life and thought. In an era when other Yiddish children’s writers avoided the subject, his children’s stories depicted traditional religious life in positive ways. He vigorously championed inclusion of traditional religious texts in secular Yiddish education.

As an older man, he regretted the wholesale rejection of religion of his generation of Yiddishists. Upon observing the results of his children’s secular Yiddish education, he shifted his understanding of an American-Yiddish culture, and decided that simply studying Jewish history, culture, and the religious texts were a necessary but not sufficient foundation for this project. He argued for more ritual practice, and for a renewal of Halakhah (way of life guided by traditional Jewish laws), in which Judaism would infuse daily life. For his last twenty-five years, until his death in 1970, he led an adult Talmud and Scripture group, exploring Jewish scholarship and theology.