Miriam Ulinover (1890-1944) was a poet born in Lodz, Poland, to a family that was both religious and worldly. Perhaps this early dual exposure to the secular and the sacred was a catalyst for her lifelong ability to move in both Orthodox society and secular Yiddish literary circles, where she stood out as a rare Orthodox woman poet.

Among the more unusual chapters in the international history of the Bais Yaakov movement is the founding of a Bais Yaakov school in Shanghai, China. Shanghai had a small Jewish community since the nineteenth century, supported by such wealthy Iraqi-Jewish families as the Sassoons and the Kadoories, but this community swelled in the early 1940s with the arrival of many thousands of Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe—Shanghai was among the few places that did not require a visa for entry.

In the interwar period, American Jewry mobilized to support Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe. The majority of the funding was collected and distributed by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), founded in 1914. The JDC kept scrupulous records of their work, and their archive includes requests for funds, reports, and photographs.