Bais Yaakov בית יעקב

The name is from Exodus 19:3: 'thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel'—and Rashi gives the explanation: 'the house of Jacob' means the women, 'the children of Israel' the men, and the women are addressed first. The verse was not chosen for ornament: it is the argument.

It began with Sarah Schenirer, who opened the first school at Kraków in 1917. The structure took shape quickly. Elementary schools, then evening classes for working girls, then seminaries for teachers—without which nothing would have come of it, since women teachers did not exist as a class. The Kraków seminary was led by Judith Grunfeld from 1924 to 1929, after which Rabbi Yehudah Leib Orlean became its director.

What was taught was not what boys are taught. Not Gemara, but the Pentateuch with its commentaries, the Prophets, the laws, Jewish history and thought—and with them the general subjects the Polish law required. It was not a smaller cheder but a different school.

By the end of the 1930s the network was working in more than two hundred and sixty towns of Poland. Its Polish part was destroyed with everything else; but it had already reached beyond Poland, and today Bais Yaakov schools exist wherever Orthodox communities do.