Sarah Schenirer שרה שנירר

Born at Kraków in 1883, third of nine children in a family with rabbinic and Hasidic connections. She had little schooling and worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. She was not a scholar and did not pretend to be—and that is part of the matter: this was done not by a gaon's daughter but by a tradeswoman with her own customers.

The impetus came at Vienna in the war year 1914: a sermon by Rabbi Moshe David Flesch on what Jewish women had been in their history. Returning, she tried gathering grown women around her—it did not take. So she turned to the girls.

She opened the first school at Kraków in 1917: twenty-five girls, the daughters of her own customers, in the room where she sewed. What followed nobody expected: growth such as no Jewish undertaking of the time had known. In 1923 Agudath Israel took the network under its wing; by the mid-1930s, some fifteen years after the first room, there were more than three hundred schools across Europe, with New York and the Land of Israel besides, and three seminaries for teachers. The teachers had to be raised: they did not exist.

She obtained the consent of the great. The Belzer Rebbe gave his blessing—though he later advised his Hasidim not to send their daughters. The Gerrer Rebbe became her chief support. The Chafetz Chaim backed her outright, and his argument was not 'it is permitted' but 'there is no other way': the times have changed, and without this the daughters will be lost.

She married twice: the first marriage, in 1910, broke up after three years; about 1930 she married Rabbi Yitzhak Landau. She had no children. She died on 26 Adar I 5695, aged fifty-one—four years before everything she had built in Poland was destroyed. It survived because it had already grown beyond her.