Struck, Ashkenasi, Maimon, Hirszenberg, Gottlieb, Epstein, Loebschuetz, and Schatz are the leaders of this new movement. The last-named, together with Ephraim Moses Lilien of Galicia, perhaps the greatest Jewish illustrator of our time, has founded a national school, Bezalel, to propagate Jewish art in Palestine, on the same principles on which the great national art schools of other countries are based. The language of instruction is Hebrew. Meanwhile the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah continued its work of Russification and general civilization. After 1880 its activity was greatly enhanced, and its members worked with renewed zeal. It opened elementary schools, and expended large sums on stipends for students, and the publication of useful and scholarly books. The branch in Odessa secured two hundred and thirty-one new members in one year (1900), making the total in that city alone nine hundred and sixty-eight. It organized a bureau of information on pedagogic subjects, and through the liberality of Kalonymos Wissotzky instituted prizes for original works in Hebrew or Russian. Individual philanthropists did their utmost to counterbalance the restrictions on education.[15] Trade schools were opened by the Committee for the Promotion of a Knowledge of Trade and Agriculture among the Jews of Russia, in Minsk, Vilna, and Vitebsk, besides fifteen manual training schools for boys and twenty for girls, in which the indigent pupils are provided with food, clothes, and books. In 1900 thirteen new schools were opened in Kherson and Yekaterinoslav, to supply the educational demand of the thirty-eight colonies existing in those Governments. In the vicinity of Minsk a Junior Republic was organized, and in many cities art and choral societies were formed.[16]