Beth David Synagogue’s 2025-26 Second-Saturday-of-the-Month Luncheon Speaker Series will resume on Saturday, September 13. Shabbat services will begin at 9:30 am, followed by the luncheon and program. Professor Eliyana R. Adler will speak on “Private Schools for Jewish Girls in the Tsarist Empire.” 
Adler is a scholar of East European Jewish history and will present insights from her award-winning book, “In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia” (Wayne State University Press, 2011, with a new edition in 2024). Her research – conducted in Russian and Lithuanian archives as well as the YIVO Institute in New York – challenges long-held conjectures about Jewish girls’ education in the 19th-century Russian Empire. The work received the 2011 Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Women’s Studies. It was translated into Russian in 2022. 
“Professor Adler’s groundbreaking work upended some previously held erroneous assumptions about Jewish girls’ education under the Russian Empire,” said organizers of the event. “She shares what was considered commonplace, as witnessed in a remark made by a European-born rabbi in a 2000 interview that appeared in The New York Times. He is quoted as saying that Jewish girls in Eastern Europe did not need any education; they just needed to learn how to peel potatoes. ‘In fact,’ Professor Adler has noted, ‘contemporary witnesses often remarked that Jewish women were much more educated than their peers. But how did this come about? My talk will discuss Jewish educational norms in the late 19th century, with a special focus on the private schools for Jewish girls that proliferated in the Russian Empire.’”
Adler recently joined the faculty in the Departments of History and Judaic Studies, and the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, at Binghamton University. She holds a doctorate from Brandeis University, and teaches and studies East European Jewish history at Binghamton. In addition to her work on Jewish girls’ education in Tsarist Russia, her most recent book, “Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) received both the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research (2021) and the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award in Polish Jewish Studies (2021). Adler has published articles in many journals and has held fellowships sponsored by multiple institutions. Her current research focuses on post-Holocaust Polish Jewish memorial books.
“We are thrilled to have Eliyana as part of our community and university,” organizers said. “Her groundbreaking work is sure to be fascinating and enlightening. She looks forward to sharing her findings and answering the important questions we know her audience will bring!” 
Beth David’s luncheon speaker series takes place the second Saturday of the month after Shabbat morning services and is open to the community. There is no charge for the luncheon. Since the monthly series’ continuation depends on the generosity of contributors, Beth David welcomes and appreciates donations to the Luncheon Fund in order to keep the program going. Donations can be made in honor of or in memory of someone, or to mark a special occasion. Those wishing an acknowledgment to be sent to the person being honored, or to the family of someone being remembered, can indicate that, along with the necessary information. Donations can be sent to Beth David Synagogue, 39 Riverside Dr., Binghamton, NY 13905, Attention: Luncheon Fund.