Bais Yaakov: Torah comes to the girls

The first school opened for twenty-five girls; fifteen years later there were more than three hundred of them.

The rift ran through single families, and that is the whole point. A boy in a Polish town was put into cheder at six, and after that the talmud torah and the yeshiva. A girl was put nowhere: what she needed for the home, it was held, she would take at home, as her mother and grandmother had. And so it worked, while the home was closed off from the street.

At the beginning of the twentieth century it opened. Polish law required schooling; girls went into state schools and gymnasia, read Polish and German, learned of a world not spoken of at home—and left observance. It came about that in one family the brother studied Gemara while his sister thought the whole of it backwardness. Many saw this and spread their hands: teaching girls Torah was not done, and the Mishnah (Sotah 3:4), where Rabbi Eliezer speaks sharply against it, was cited.

Sarah Schenirer was a seamstress of Kraków with no learning at all. In 1914 at Vienna she heard a sermon by Rabbi Moshe David Flesch on Jewish women in history—and came back with a design. First she tried gathering grown women: it did not take. Then she turned to the girls.

She opened her school in 1917 in the room where she sewed: twenty-five girls, the daughters of her own customers. What followed nobody expected. In 1923 Agudath Israel took the network under its wing, and growth came like an avalanche: by the mid-1930s more than three hundred schools, in over two hundred and sixty towns of Poland, and three seminaries—teachers had to be raised, for they did not exist.

The consent of the great was obtained, and that is a part of the story in itself. The Belzer Rebbe gave his blessing—though he later advised his Hasidim not to send their daughters. The Gerrer Rebbe became the chief support. The Chafetz Chaim backed it outright, and his argument is worth remembering: he said not 'this is permitted' but 'there is no other way'—the times have changed, and under the old order the daughters will be lost. That is: the change was acknowledged as a change, not passed off as antiquity.

What was taught was not what boys are taught: not Gemara, but the Pentateuch with its commentaries, the Prophets, the laws, history and thought—together with the general subjects Polish law required.

Sarah Schenirer died in 1935, aged fifty-one. Four years later the Polish network was destroyed along with all Polish Jewry. What she had made survived because it had already gone beyond Poland: today Bais Yaakov schools stand wherever there are Orthodox communities, and in that world the education of girls is no longer discussed as a question.