According to the testimony of the official Russian sources, he tried to persuade the Minister to abolish all "private schools," the heders, and to forbid all private teachers, the melammeds, to teach even temporarily in the projected new schools, and to import, instead, the whole teaching staff from Germany.
Lilienthal himself tells us in his Memoirs that he made bold to remind the Minister that all obstacles in the path of the desired re-education of the Russian Jews would disappear, were the Tzar to grant them complete emancipation.

To this the Minister retorted that the initiative must come from the Jews themselves who first must try to "deserve the favor of the Sovereign." At any rate, Lilienthal accepted the proffered task.

He was commissioned to tour the Pale of Settlement, to organize there the few isolated progressive Jews, "the lovers of enlightenment," or Maskilim, as they styled themselves, and to propagate the idea of a school-reform among the orthodox Jewish masses.
While setting out on his journey, Lilienthal himself did not fully realize the difficulties of the task he had undertaken.

He was to instill confidence in the "benevolent intentions of the Government" into the hearts of a people which by an uninterrupted series of persecutions and cruel restrictions had been reduced to the level of pariahs.

He was to make them believe that the Government was a well-wisher of Jewish children, those same children, who at that very time were hunted like wild beasts by the "captors" in the streets of the Pale, who were turned by the thousands into soldiers, deported into outlying provinces, and belabored in such a manner that scarcely half of them remained alive and barely a tenth remained within the Jewish fold.