Objects

Certificate of the 4-class Market School in Łódź, from which Józef Finkiel graduated in 1910. The document was entirely drawn up in Russian. In the upper left corner is the name of the school and the date. In the central part of the document once can see the heading, and below a list of the grades obtained by the student. At the bottom of the document there is the stamp of the school and the signature (of the principal?). Only the first page was filled out. The certificate was drawn up in Russian because the document dates from the time of the Partitions of Poland and the intensive russification of schooling. At the time when Józef Finkiel attended the middle school, Łódź was part of the Kingdom of Poland established in 1815 (commonly known as the Congress Kingdom of Poland or Congress Poland, later also as the Vistula Country), which was granted a certain degree of autonomy. However, it was bound to the Russian Empire by a personal union, and successive tsars became kings of Poland at the same time. After the defeat of subsequent national uprisings, however, this autonomy was gradually reduced, and eventually, completely abolished. The abolition of autonomy had particularly severe consequences for education, which was subjected to increasingly strong russification. Gradually, the Polish language was being removed from the education system. The end result, in 1885, was its placement as a second, non-obligatory school language. MF