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.

Devorah Epelgrad Cohn was a Bais Yaakov student who studied directly under Sarah Schenirer and documented her life in Bais Yaakov and afterward. She taught at three Bais Yaakov schools in Poland before escaping from Vilna in 1941. She continued her work in Jewish education in Boston, always remembering her time in Bais Yaakov and sharing her memories with family and students.