: Kehillot) is the local Jewish communal structure that was reinstated in the early twentieth century as a modern, secular, and religious sequel of the qahal in Central and Eastern Europe, more particularly in Poland's Second Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Kingdom of Romania, Lithuania, Ukrainian People's Republic, during the interwar period (1918–1940), in application of the national personal autonomy.
Unlike the ancient Qahal/Kehilla, abolished in the Russian Empire by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844,[1] the modern Kehilla council was elected like a municipal council, with lists of candidates presented by the various Jewish parties: Agudat Yisrael, the religious and non religious Zionists, but also the marxist Bundists and Poalists, the liberal-minded secularist Folkists, et cetera.
The Bund boycotted the 1931 elections in protest over the introduction by the Polish government, in order to favour its Agudist allies, of a “paragraph 20” in the Kehillot regulations which provided the Kehilla electoral commission with the possibility to reject a number of Agudat's opponents who were in their opinion not religious enough.
[4] Informally, Kehilla can be an all-encompassing term that refers to the entirety of a Jewish community's religious and secular society,[5] especially in regards to modern Ashkenazi Orthodox neighborhoods.
According to the Talmud, the ten things a city needs for a Torah scholar to be able to study in it are "[a] court that [punishes] with lashes and punishes [with penalties]; a charity fund, collected by two and distributed by three; a synagogue; a bathhouse; a restroom; a physician; a surgeon; a notary; (a butcher); and a teacher of children.