and also two rabbinical seminaries, the one in Vilna, the other
in Zhitomir, the former being considered the Jewish metropolis of the
northwestern part, the latter, of the southwestern part, of Russia. They
also proposed to do away with the Judeo-Polish garb, and suggested
certain alterations in the prayer book.

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 AEsop, 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, _a 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]

For Lilienthal's disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized
the error of his ways. In his book, _My Travels in Russia_, published
both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the
schools he advocated were after all in the right. Education without
emancipation was indeed the straightest road to conversion. Witness the
thirty thousand Jewish apostates in St. P