Note (return) — Chapter IV

The delegates met, deliberated, and disbanded, but the tidings announced in Lilienthal's epistle did not prove to be good. In one of the fables of Kryloff, the Russian Æsop, we are told that once a swan, a pike, and a crab, decided to make a trip together. No sooner had they started than, in accordance with their nature, the swan began to fly, the pike to shuffle along, the crab to crawl backward. It was so with the delegation of 1843. Rabbi Isaac, the rabid Mitnagged, could find but little to admire in the proposals of Rabbi Menahem Mendel, the ardent Hasid, and both were bitterly opposed to the view preached by Doctor Lilienthal, that the salvation of the Jews and Judaism would be brought about by a system of education adopted in accordance with an ukase by Nicholas. Stern, too, had little use for Lilienthal, whom he declared to be ignorant of the condition of Russian Jews and incapable of working in their behalf. From such discord nothing good could come. The fact is, that the few resolutions mentioned had been drawn up beforehand by the Government officials, and the time and trouble and expense which the council involved were, à la Russe, for appearance sake. Finding his efforts an utter failure, Lilienthal went to Odessa with letters of recommendation from Uvarov to Vorontzov, the patron of Stern, and was elected rabbi of that enlightened and wealthy community. But, for some inexplicable reason, he suddenly left the city on the plea of visiting friends in Germany, and went to the United States, where he remained to the end of his life, and became one of the leading rabbis and communal workers among his coreligionists whose lines had fallen in pleasanter places than the fortunes of those he had left behind in Russia.11