Urye Kahan

Yiddish Writer and Proponent of Educational Reform

Urye Kahan wrote articles for the early Yiddish weekly Kol mevaser, on topics such as education reform and popular science. He also provided biographies of famous figures in Jewish history. Writing under his own name or under the pseudonym “Ish ployni vekoyen” (meaning "So-and-So ha-Kohen,” a moniker meant to recall m. Ketubot 1:8), Kahan wrote on the need to educate girls as well as boys, and on the need to reform and expand traditional heder education to include grammar, logic, reading, writing, and arithmetic.