A Traditional Revolutionary: Sarah Schenirer’s Legacy Revisited
On a rainy Sunday morning in March of 1935, the streets of Krakow, Poland filled with mourning girls. They joined other Orthodox Jews in paying their respects to Sarah Schenirer, the founder of Bais Yaakov, who had passed away the day before. After the funeral, the girls went back to their school building. There, in the words of Schenirer’s student Pearl Benisch, they sat until late that night, “lamenting and mourning the loss of our dear mother . . . retelling stories and anecdotes about our noble mentor’s great acts of piety and loving-kindness.”1 These girls’ reaction to a teacher’s death might seem a little extreme, but to them, Sarah Schenirer was not just a teacher. She had become their spiritual leader, and she remains a spiritual leader today.
A little more than a year ago, the Orthodox world marked the eightieth yahrtzeit of Sarah Schenirer and events commemorating the occasion attest to the continued centrality of Sarah Schenirer in Orthodox Jewish life. On a brisk Tuesday morning in March of 2015, over 14,000 women and girls gathered together in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center from all over North America—with many more watching via satellite hook-up. They came to commemorate the life of a woman they had never met, but who impacted their lives profoundly. Sarah Schenirer turned the socially unacceptable idea of girls learning Torah in a Jewish school into a way of life for Jews all over the world, providing a model of how to successfully balance tradition and innovation.
Modest. Radical. Pious. Revolutionary. Staunch traditionalist. Proto-feminist. All of these words have been used to describe this woman. Even more than eighty years after her death, Sarah Schenirer is consistently invoked to defend diverse viewpoints on contemporary issues. For example, Rabbi Avi Weiss, in a Jewish Week editorial supporting women’s ordination (11/3/15), presented her as proof that women can be spiritual leaders in line with tradition, a forerunner to the Orthodox women rabbis of today. The following week, Rabbi Efraim Epstein, in a Jewish Link of Bergen County editorial opposing women’s ordination (11/12/15), presented her as an example of a true Orthodox woman leader, who unlike the women seeking ordination, remained faithful to the mesorah without sparking controversy or being influenced by the secular ideologies of the day. Who was this complicated personality and how does her influence continue to impact the Jewish community today?
Sarah Schenirer founded Bais Yaakov in Poland in 1917. Before that time, Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe considered formal Jewish education for girls to be unnecessary, inappropriate and even forbidden by Jewish law. For most girls, Jewish education took place in the home. Taught by family members or private tutors, girls’ education generally consisted of basic literacy in Yiddish and enough Hebrew to read a siddur. Anything else a girl needed to know about halachah or Jewish observance could be learned by observing her mother and other women in the home.2
With government laws mandating compulsory education, more and more Jewish children began attending secular public schools. While significant numbers of boys and girls attended modern secular schools, a far greater number of girls than boys received this type of education. Some Orthodox Jews considered it preferable that women should spend the time acquiring secular skills, so they could later use them to help support the continued learning of the men in their family. One rabbi, in looking for a shidduch for his sister, boasted that she knew how to write Hebrew, Polish and German fluently and had knowledge of Russian as well. These were qualities that could secure a woman a good shidduch in those days.
Pupils in the Bais Yaakov religious girls’ seminary of Krakow during a visit to Rabka, Poland, interwar period. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive
But as a result of their exposure to secular learning, girls experienced a great disparity between their intellectual engagement with secular studies and their informal training in the laws and traditions of Judaism. These girls, who were never formally taught about their Jewish heritage, saw religion as archaic and a hindrance to intellectual growth. Assimilation, intermarriage and conversion became rampant.
Some rabbis blamed this development on the girls’ lack of any significant Jewish education, but community leadership remained steadfastly opposed to any innovation in women’s education. In 1903, at a convention of Polish rabbis held in Krakow, a delegate called for the establishment of schools for girls, stating that his colleagues had neglected girls’ education. The conference almost unanimously opposed his suggestion and stated in its resolutions that Jewish parents should definitely educate their daughters at home, but for the community to establish schools would be wrong.
Where others failed, an unknown Polish seamstress and her grassroots Bais Yaakov movement would prove astoundingly successful. Sarah Schenirer was born in 1883 to a prominent Chassidic family in Krakow, Poland. She attended a state school until age thirteen, but her family’s poor financial condition precluded her from pursuing her formal education any further. Schenirer taught herself to be a seamstress and continued her secular learning through reading and attending lectures. She also actively pursued a Jewish education through self-study. She writes about studying the Tze’na Urena, a Yiddish translation of the Chumash that was standard fare for women. However, she also mentions studying texts that were more unusual for women to study—such as a Yiddish version of the Chok L’Yisrael, which contains a daily portion of Chumash, Navi, Mishnah and Gemara.3
Schenirer wrote in her autobiography that she became concerned about assimilation in her community for a number of years before she started Bais Yaakov. She recounted attending a meeting of a Jewish girls’ organization on a Friday night. She expressed her alarm at seeing girls, who had grown up in Chassidic families like her own, violating Shabbat and making heretical remarks. Schenirer also described a gap she perceived between girls and their families in her Chassidic community. While Schenirer saw boys and men involved in intense Jewish learning and spending the yamim tovim gaining spiritual inspiration from their rebbe, she viewed women’s religious lives as empty. She is quoted as saying, “We stay at home, the wives, the daughters with the little ones. We have an empty yom tov. It is bare of Jewish intellectual concentration.”4 Schenirer perceived girls and young women growing disconnected from religion and tradition, and blamed this distance on their lack of Jewish education.
Sarah Schenirer did not envision playing a part in a solution to this problem until she fled to Vienna during World War I and became exposed to and profoundly impacted by the Neo-Orthodox thought of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Rabbi Hirsch’s works were not available in Poland and many Eastern Europeans leaders considered his writings non-applicable to their insular society, which had not yet come into much contact with Reform Jewish thought. Schenirer thought that if she could only transmit these ideas to Polish women and girls, they would feel connected with their religion.
Upon returning to Poland, she resolved to teach what she had learned. After failing in her first attempts at teaching women and older girls, who mocked her religiosity, Schenirer decided that her best plan of action would be to start a school for young girls, whom she hoped would be more responsive. Her brother discouraged her from getting involved in such a controversial and political project. He suggested she go with him to visit the leader of their sect of Chassidim, the Belzer Rebbe, and ask his advice. He likely assumed the highly conservative rebbe would say no and thereby put an end to his sister’s crazy plan. The rebbe, however, responded to her query with two words, “Berachah v’hatzlachah” (“blessing and success”). Even though he did not allow the daughters of Belzer Chassidim to attend Bais Yaakov, his blessing was a strategic coup for Schenirer. In subsequent years, Bais Yaakov received approbations from prominent rabbis including the Gerrer Rebbe, Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman and the Chofetz Chaim. The Chofetz Chaim in general stressed the propriety of Jewish education for girls and stated that the old system needed to be readjusted in accordance with the times. Jewish communities were no longer isolated from the outside world, as they might have been in the past. Therefore, it was necessary to teach girls about Judaism if they were to stay in the faith.5
From Jewish Action, here.