Objects

Secondary school certificate of Józef Finkiel issued by the Board of Teachers of the Pabjanicka 7-grade Trade School on 23 June 1913. The name of the school is in the upper part of the document, the header is below. In the central part there is a list of subjects with final grades. At the bottom of the document are the signatures of the members of the Board of Teachers and the stamps of the school. The document was drawn up in 3 languages. The central part of the document is in Polish, the right in French and the left in Russian. The content of the document is the same in every language. A decorative frame can be seen along the edges. | Thanks to the preserved document, one can find out what subjects were taught to young people at the beginning of the 20th century. Many of them, such as "hygjena" (hygiene), "buchalteria" (bookkeeping) or "keligrafji" (calligraphy) are no longer to be found in modern school. Others, such as "zoologija" (zoology), "botanika" (botanics) or "anatomija" (anatomy) have become part of more cross-cutting subjects (biology or science). It is also worth noting the spelling of the names of almost all subjects, as well as the name of the school itself ("Pabjanicka", instead of "Pabianicka"). The rules of the Polish language we use today were introduced with the so-called Great Spelling Reform of 1936, the aim of which was to regulate the spelling of the Polish language and to standardise it. Although words such as "anatomija" (now "anatomia") seem distant today, they were quite common at the time when Józef Finkiel attended school. | The certificate is also a source of valuable information about Józef Finkiel himself. Thanks to it, we know not only in which fields he did better and in which he did worse. We can also learn when he was born, in which years he attended the "Pabjanicka 7-grade Trade School", and that he showed exemplary behaviour and was of Jewish faith. | MF