Mattityahu Strashun

Who was Mattityahu Strashun?

Mattityahu Strashun was a rabbi and scholar of Vilna, the son of Samuel Strashun.

Having come from a well-to-do family, the young Strashun, at the age of 13 or 14, married Sarah Hanah, the eldest daughter of the wealthy Joseph Elijah Eliasberg. The couple had two daughters, Gita and Itta, who both died very young. With the help of his father-in-law, Strashun founded a business, which was managed mostly by his wife and her brother. Strashun remained financially independent throughout his life.

By the 1840s Strashun had publicly revealed himself as a Maskil, or supporter of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement. In 1841, when a group of educated Jews led by Nisan Rosenthal established two Haskalah-inspired schools in Vilna, where children studied both secular and religious subjects, Strashun was a teacher at one of the schools. Around the same time, on the occasion of the visit in Vilna of Max Lilienthal, a representative of the Russian ministry of education, Strashun lent support to Lilienthal's project for government-sponsored secular and religious education, taking the position of the maskilim in the intensive debates that arose between maskilic and traditional groups about the educational reforms.