3 - ‘Building Bais Yaakov’: Institution and Charisma

Summary

The wisest of women builds her house

(Prov. 14: 1)

When the daughters of Zelophehad heard that the land was to be apportioned among the tribes—but only to males, not to females—they gathered together to take counsel, saying: the mercies of flesh and blood are not like the mercies of God. Human beings are more merciful to males than to females. But he who spoke and brought the world into being is different—his mercies are for males and females equally. His mercies are for all!

(Sifrei Num. 133)

BY THE TIME Sarah Schenirer died in 1935 at the age of 51, the movement she had started in 1917 to provide Orthodox girls with a rigorous Jewish education was already well established, with perhaps 225 schools and 36,000 students throughout Poland and beyond. Together with the boys’ schools that functioned alongside Bais Yaakov under the aegis of Agudath Israel, it constituted the largest Jewish private school network in interwar Poland. The great majority of its pupils were enrolled in small supplementary schools, generally with only one teacher, that they attended before or after their public-school day. Beginning in 1929, Bais Yaakov established full-day schools in the larger cities, with a programme of secular studies that conformed to state regulations in addition to Jewish studies. By the 1930s, large cities like Warsaw and Łodź had a number of Bais Yaakov schools serving different age groups and neighbourhoods. While handiwork and dressmaking were included from the very first years, the movement later expanded and professionalized its curriculum, establishing a vocational high school and vocational post-high school in Warsaw and Łodź respectively; the latter, renamed Ohel Sarah after Sarah Schenirer's death, served around 300 students at its height. These schools combined Jewish subjects with courses in dressmaking, tailoring, secretarial skills, bookkeeping, business, child care, hygiene, and nursing. (The Łodź school also hosted a two-year hakhsharah training programme for Bnos members preparing to emigrate to the Land of Israel; the first graduates arrived in Tel Aviv in 1934, setting up an urban kibbutz that served as a centre for both Bais Yaakov and Bnos.) Vocational training was not an in-cidental part of Bais Yaakov's curriculum.