In Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents [1772-1914], pp. 302-303 the following petition is translated:
Petition of a Rabbi and Merchants of Zhitomir
to Count Kiselev [Chairman of the Committee
for the Organization of Jewish Life], against
the Zhitomir Police (1853)
“Materialy i soobshcheniia. Goneniia na zhenskie golovye ubory, (1853)”
Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 400–401.
The Zhitomir city police, without announcing the state order that is
the basis for their actions, demand that Jewish women appear in public
with uncovered heads, and they accompany this requirement with every
kind of coercion and unprecedented violence. Thus the district
supervisor and policemen tear off the wigs, bonnets, and other
headdresses of Jewish women; they drag them by the hair to the police
station or guardhouse, pour several buckets full of cold water over
their heads, keep them under arrest for several days, and finally
force them to sweep the streets. They drove the merchants’ wives from
the theater with humiliating mockery and personal insults for
appearing in wigs rather than in their own uncovered hair. These
public insults and torture of the weaker sex—women—without
distinction, without the smallest respect for age and status, have had
very harsh consequences: some have fallen gravely ill from shame and
fear, and they have also paid with their health and perhaps their
lives to observe their [religious] law, without committing any civil
crime.
Jewish law absolutely forbids women to display their hair, and we see
the manifest mercy of our Sovereign Emperor, the All Gracious Monarch,
in his imperial law of 12 April 1851: he only prohibited Jewish women
from shaving their heads, but without ordering that they appear in
public with uncovered heads. In other words, His Majesty does not want
us to violate our law. We piously obey His Majesty’s will: all of our
women wear their hair; they do not have it shaved and cut.1
However, they do cover their hair with wigs or other headdresses when
appearing in public and do not differ from local Christian women of
various ranks. However, to evaluate the unfairness of the Zhitomir
police, one should note another imperial directive from 19 August
1852, which ordered that Jewish women who shave their heads despite
the prohibition be fined five silver rubles. Hence, for violating the
sovereign’s will, His Imperial Majesty established only a monetary
fine. But the Zhitomir city police, for ignoring its whim, subject
them [women] to public insult and torture without a trial (to which no
criminal is subject and for which there is not even a designation in
the Code of Punishment) and compels our women to violate their own
[religious] law. What is more, by insulting women publicly, the police
themselves are committing a criminal act for what is not even a mere
misdemeanor in any law or decree. Our extremely difficult position
gives us no choice but to seek the protection and patronage of Your
Excellency, as the chairman of the Committee for the Organization of
Jewish Life. We humbly ask you to issue the appropriate order to end
the capricious demand of the Zhitomir city police (which has no basis
in the exact meaning of the Imperial injunction promulgated by a
decree from the State Senate on 12 April 1851) and to protect us from
the violent coercion and torture to which our women are subjected for
observing their law.
