William Chomsky

Who was William Chomsky?

William Chomsky was an American scholar of Hebrew. He was born in Ukraine and fled to the United States in 1913 to avoid conscription into the army. He worked in sweatshops in Baltimore before gaining employment teaching at the city's Hebrew elementary schools, using his money to fund his studies at Johns Hopkins University. Marrying Elsie Simonofsky – a native of what is present-day Belarus who grew up in the United States – they moved to Philadelphia, where they both began teaching at the Mikveh Israel religious school, with William eventually rising to the position of school principal.

In 1924, he was appointed to the faculty at the country's oldest Jewish teacher training institution, Gratz College, where he became faculty president in 1932. In 1955 he also began teaching courses at Dropsie College. Independently, he was involved in researching Medieval Hebrew, eventually authoring a series of books on the language: How to Teach Hebrew in the Elementary Grades, Hebrew, the Story of a Living Language, Hebrew, the Eternal Language, Teaching and Learning, and an edited version of David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar. Described as a "very warm, gentle, and engaging" individual, William Chomsky placed a great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a view that would be subsequently be adopted by his son.