Naomi Seidman

Bais Yaakov, the Talmud, and Me

Who would have predicted, even a few decades ago, that the Talmud would come to acquire what passes for glamour in the academic world?

I witnessed this as a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1990s, where the internationally renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin was training a new cohort of young scholars.

There were also places like Drisha, or Svara, where serious Talmud study was available to people beyond the usual yeshiva demographic.

But for all the excitement I saw in others falling in love with the Talmud, I somehow never caught the bug, despite participating in my share of partner study sessions and appreciating the rabbinics scholarship I read or heard.

Recently, it occurred to me that my failure to fall in love with the Talmud may have something to do with having been raised in the world of Bais Yaakov.

As a Bais Yaakov girl, I was of course excluded from study of the Talmud. The distinction between the permitted study of the Written Torah (the Bible and its commentaries) and the forbidden study of the Oral Torah (prototypically, the Talmud) is fundamental to the Bais Yaakov curriculum. It was this distinction that rendered organized Torah study by girls permissible in the eyes of rabbinical authorities of the time, who read Rabbi Eliezer’s famous dictum, “Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut (licentiousness, triviality),” as pertaining only to the study of rabbinic sources.

But all of this rationale was in the historical background of Bais Yaakov rather than part of the day-to-day culture of the school. In the Bais Yaakov schools in which I was raised, Torah was simply understood differently than it was for our brothers: we studied Torah in a way that kept us within the lines drawn by Rabbi Eliezer and his later interpreters, but without reference to those lines.

In short, we carried on a Jewish intellectual life as if we lacked for nothing, as if Rabbi Eliezer and his entire crowd had never existed – it was only in seminary, I think, that I was first introduced to that particular halakhic discussion.

In my last year as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, Daniel Boyarin gave a job talk in which he argued for the legitimacy of women studying Talmud.

**The question I put to him at the end of the talk was why women should want to study the Talmud.**

He was clearly taken aback, as if the value of such study was so obvious to him that he had never considered that anyone might feel differently. But I did and do.

Of course, I have studied and taught rabbinic sources, and my book on Bais Yaakov includes a requisite analysis of the halakhic issues involved in Jewish education for girls. But Sarah Schenirer wrote about Torah as if the Torah she was teaching was Torah in its entirety, and as if it was entirely clear to her that this Torah was directed to women as much as to men (and directed at them first, as the verse from which the title of the school derives suggests).

Here, for instance, is the opening of her mission statement for the Bais Yaakov movement, published in the first issue of the Bais Yaakov Journal (1923, six years after she opened her first school) and republished as part of Gezamlte shrift, what can only be called her “sefer” (which was the way the book was described in advertisements—as ‘the first sefer authored by a woman in many centuries’):

I think that by now everyone knows that the sole mission of the Bais Yaakov schools is to educate Jewish girls so that, with all their strength and with every breath, they will serve the Creator and fulfill the commandments of the Torah with seriousness and passion. . . .The Torah is directed at everyone: to the individual and the collective, priest and Israelite, educated and simple, judge or worker, prophet and ordinary man. The commandments must be fulfilled in the home and in the field, in private life as in society, in the Temple as on the street, in a business as in a workshop. It opens one’s eyes to see the divine power in nature, recognize Providence in the workings of history. It teaches us to understand our place among the nations. The Torah demands from us that we ‘impress these words upon your very heart’—and that we should spread its ideals in the world, ‘and teach them to your children—reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away’, whether we are asleep or awake from sleep, it must be the one straight line that we walk as we lead our lives, the crown on our heads, the watchword of our domestic and public lives—‘on the doorposts of your house and on your gates’ [Deut 11: 18-21].

Understand, Jewish women and girls! For thousands of years the Jewish people lived with the Torah. Millions of great men and women drew all their emotions, thoughts and values about everything in life from its holy fire. The national treasure that we labored for from time eternal has always been: the study of Torah.

While the men who supported Sarah Schenirer regularly discussed the halakhic ramifications of teaching girls Torah, Schenirer – here and elsewhere – simply talks about Torah as if it were clear to her that women participated in its study alongside all other Jews. The sentence “The Torah is directed at everyone: to the individual and the collective, priest and Israelite, educated and simple, judge or worker, prophet and ordinary man” is striking in not even mentioning men and women—the primary distinction referred to in rabbinic discussions of Torah study.

Classroom in the Krakow seminary. 1930s. Ghetto Fighters House Archive.

Whatever strategic impulses may have led Schenirer to avoid discussing what Rabbi Eliezer may have thought of her enterprise, she helped construct an alternative value system that shaped my own attitude to the Jewish library.

Maybe my failure to fall in love with Talmud is just the result of a deficit in my Jewish education.

But it was also part of my Jewish education that this was no deficit at all.

Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow; her 2019 book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, explores the history of the movement in the interwar period.

Mechitzas and Movies: Female Culture in a Gender-Segregated Community

A young girl peers over the divider at the Kosel (Western Wall), looking at a man wearing a tallis (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries).

A Haredi wedding, with men dancing on the right side of the partition, and the women dancing on the left side.

Among the most visible signs of the Orthodox move to the right over the past few decades has been the creep of separations between men and women, boys and girls, beyond the shul and school, to weddings, parks, buses, and now even sidewalks and airplane aisles.

The term “gender segregation” is deceptively neutral. The arrangement generally puts women in the back of the bus, requires them to follow strict modesty codes, reads them as potential sexual temptresses whose modesty or (even better) invisibility keeps men from sin. Their faces may not be seen, their voices may not be heard, by a man.

Their own spiritual expressions—for instance, singing a prayer or song out loud—hardly matter in this scheme, which concerns itself solely with the relationship between God and (the Jewish) man.

This was of course already the case in Eastern Europe, where Bais Yaakov arose within a community in which gender segregation had helped propel the crisis of young girls’ defections from Orthodoxy. Girls, excluded from the Hasidic court and the yeshiva, looked elsewhere for activities, experiences, relationships.

Men examine lulavim (palm fronds) in Meah Shearim, Jerusalem; a sign proclaims “Men Only: Entry for women is strictly forbidden.”

When Bais Yaakov sought to find opportunities for girls’ spiritual experiences, some on the right of the Orthodox spectrum objected less on the grounds of what was happening in these schools than on the effect this experiment might have on men. The Munkatcher Rebbe Chaim Elazar Spira was angered that the singing voices of Bais Yaakov girls, praying the Friday evening service together in their school, could be heard by boys and men in nearby prayer houses.

But what of the effect of gender segregation on women? That the increasing stringency is harmful to young girls is part of what Leslie Ginsparg Klein has been arguing, in multiple venues including the hashtag #frumwomenhavefaces and her rap/spoken word about how erasing women and girls harms the community. To peruse the website of a girls’ school and see nothing but photos of men, a familiar experience for those researching Bais Yaakov, sends a message that can hardly be entirely positive. (See my post about photos of girls and women in interwar Poland, where no similar taboo seems to have been in effect.)

But what if the effect is not entirely negative?

What if gender segregation was also an engine for spiritual energy and community cohesiveness for girls, as it seems to often be for boys and men?

Not that this was the point: it seems clear that the separation of women from men was not designed with women in mind, at all. Nevertheless, there are benefits, it seems to me, to growing up in a community of girls and women.

One of these might be a kind of disappearance of gender, or “femininity,” or the eyes of men within those all-girl classes and camps.

Despite the monitoring of skirt lengths and the expectation of being an “eydl meydl” or “kosher Jewish daughter” or “modest Jewish princess,” and despite the episodes in pizza stores and chat rooms, Orthodox girls grow up away from boys, in a world of girls and women.

Ronit Polin Tarshish, director of two films, writer of plays performed by many Bais Yaakov schools, and founder of FlyingSparks Productions.

Some of these girls grow up to direct films, in a time when female directors are still rare in Hollywood. Beyond these “kosher” films, directed to audiences of girls and women, the world of Bais Yaakov is rich with performance, music, dance—as rich as it has been nearly from the beginning.

These plays and performances had certain parallels among traditional Jewish male culture, but it seems to me that it was also a distinctly female phenomenon, with no real male counterpart. Denigrated by men as feminine and frivolous, this culture thrived with no men to witness it.

Might gender segregation provide the perfectly fertile ground for such cultural productivity? Along with the passion for gender segregation that has been driving so many Haredi communities, might we also be witnessing another sort of feminine passion within the world created by this segregation—a passion for performance, culture, and personal expression?

A song composed for a school Shabbaton on the theme of modesty, Bais Yaakov High School in Brooklyn, 2005.

Why Didn’t Sarah Schenirer Want Her Photo Published?

It’s well known to every Bais Yaakov girl that Sarah Schenirer did not want her photograph published. When I began my research almost ten years ago, there was still no widely available photo of her. Instead, what circulated was a line drawing that had been distributed by Bais Yaakov in the interwar period, and was included in the frontispiece of her 1933 Gizamelte shriftn (Collected Writings).

It was only in 2007 that the now-familiar photo (below) was published in SŚwiat przed katastrofą. Żydzi krakowscy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (A World Before a Catastrophe: Krakow’s Jews Between the Wars), edited by Jan M. Malecki. The photo surfaced online in 2008 in a blog post on the Seforim Blog by Dr. Shnayer Leiman of YU.

The title of Pearl Benisch’s biography of Schenirer, Carry Me in Your Heart, refers to what Schenirer would say when asked for a photo from one of her beloved students: her resistance to being photographed was softened by her words, which made palpable the love and closeness that tied founder to followers, even in the absence of a photo.

Sarah Schenirer’s resistance to being photographed is of a piece with other aspects of how she is described in the movement, including her “shunning the spotlight” at the grand ceremony in 1927 to lay the cornerstone of the Krakow Seminary.

Her piety and modesty are sufficient to explain the absence of a photo of a woman so revered, whose photo would be cherished by thousands.

A postcard sent from the professionalization course at Rabka, 1928.

That many Orthodox publications, and even Bais Yaakov websites, now refrain from publishing photos of women and girls, lends support to the supposition that Schenirer held back her photo because of her commitment to feminine modesty.

That may well be true. But there are a number of other aspects of Sarah Schenirer’s biography that complicate this picture.

The presence of dozens of photos of women on this website, and in interwar Bais Yaakov publications, stands as evidence that Bais Yaakov had no conception of the publication of women’s photographs as immodest.

Many photographs were professionally done, and photography was clearly an important part of Bais Yaakov culture.

Moreover, the notion that Sarah Schenirer “shunned the spotlight” at the 1927 ceremony is qualified by contemporary newspaper reports, which simply describe the event as sexually segregated in the audience, with only men on the dais. This, too, was simply normal Agudah practice for public events. It makes sense to describe Sarah Schenirer as modestly refusing an invitation to sit on the dais only if such an invitation had been offered. But there is no reason to think it was.

The question might be more easily resolved by reading Sarah Schenirer’s own words in relation to a request for a photograph. I have found only one such direct quote, in a 1933 article in the Bais Yaakov Ruf, the periodical that served the Lithuanian branch of the movement. The anonymous article quotes a letter from Sarah Schenirer responding to the newspaper’s request:

In regard to your request for a photo to publish in your newspaper, I absolutely cannot do that for you, and further insist that my photograph will not, God forbid, appear in your newspaper. I am terribly against that, but unfortunately my photo has been published throughout the land without my consent, and my anguish over that has been indescribable.

Sarah Schenirer

The report continues by noting that these words can themselves provide a truly beautiful portrait of Frau Schenirer, a portrait that reflects her truly Jewish modesty.

This report seems to confirm the understanding of Sarah Schenirer’s reluctance to have her photo published as a form of Jewish piety, or at least shows us that this reluctance was understood in this way during her own lifetime. But the words, an apparent direct quotation from Frau Schenirer, do not spell out the reasons for her determination to keep her photo from publication.

Moreover, they express something of her strong will—she speaks of her rights, of consent, and makes her absolute refusal clear without attempting to soften her words.

Not modesty but rather fierce determination and self-protection are what come through in these words.

Might there have been another explanation?

Sarah Schenirer’s application for an identification card [National Archives Kraków, call number: STGKR 990].

Sarah Schenirer’s diary speaks of her sense of herself as unattractive, and records her pain (during her difficult first marriage) at feeling that she could hardly expect her husband’s love, given her lack of beauty. In this context, it may be relevant that the article that records her refusal to have her photo published also gets her age wrong: the article begins by stating that the newspaper sought the photograph in the context of celebrating her sixtieth birthday—in fact, Schenirer turned not sixty but fifty in July 1933.

Are we getting the picture straight, in subsuming all these complicated social and psychological factors under the rubric of “modesty”?

We now have a photo of Sarah Schenirer, one she would have fought to keep away from prying eyes. What are the ethics of showing it?

My own discomfort around these questions have led me to include the photo only in the context of the application form in which it appears, and as small as possible—admittedly a partial salve.

The face that appears on the form is less “feminine,” and more “modern” in some hard-to-describe fashion than the drawing.

Does it tell us something about Sarah Schenirer that the drawing did not?

Does the drawing tell us something about how Sarah Schenirer was idealized, and obscured, by the movement she founded?

Does some truth lie between the drawing and the photo?

What emerges from these photos and words, once we allow them to expand beyond the simple and comforting idea of Schenirer’s as the perfect image of a Jewish woman’s tsnies?

A previous version of this post mis-identified the first date of appearance of Sarah Schenirer’s photo.
Many thanks to Fred MacDowell for pointing out our error.

Singing the Bais Yaakov Song on a Lakewood Farm

In September 1975, my father, Hillel Seidman, wrote an article in the Algemeiner Journal called “Pages from ‘the Eliezer Schindler Affair.’”

It starts:

A visit to our house by a student of the Bais Yaakov Seminary in Krakow; another visit by a teacher from there brought back to mind the whole Eliezer Schindler affair. The two women tell the story of visiting the poet, who was then a farmer in Lakewood, New Jersey. He sang for them his Bais Yaakov song, which Bais Yaakov girls in Poland used to sing. His wife accompanied him on the piano, tears streaming down both their faces.

That reminded me of my own visit to Lakewood, and earlier times we met before the Holocaust times, talking for hours in Warsaw.

The song Schindler sang is the first one in the Bais Yaakov songbook I found so many years ago in the YIVO archive, the catchiest one, and the only one that is still sometimes remembered. Dainy Bernstein supplied a chorus, absent from the songbook, that they had heard in their family.

Recording by Dainy Bernstein supplying the chorus missing from the songbook [with an incorrect word in the verse]:

I had long seen and noticed that the song was written by Eliezer Schindler, and known, too, that he had been a farmer in New Jersey. But I had not heard the story that my father relates here, that Schindler and his wife sang the song for a visiting teacher and graduate of the Krakow Seminary, and cried.

This I learned from the article, which Miriam Oles, Schindler’s granddaughter, emailed to me this week, with the question of whether Hillel Seidman was a relation.

Sali (Hojda) Schindler and Eliezer Schindler on their Lakewood Farm

Beyond the moving picture of the song, the detail that catches me is the Lakewood farm. Why a farm? And why in Lakewood?

My father doesn’t exactly say why Schindler chose to live outside the centers of Orthodox life in America at the time, but he does paint a picture that helps us guess at an explanation. Schindler, the poet and farmer, was a living bridge between Germany and Poland, combining an artist’s life and deep connections to his Hasidic past.

Schindler traveled to Poland to recruit Agudah youth to Nathan Birnbaum’s utopian project, Olim (The Ascenders), which called for Jews to return to working the land, to live simply and collectively, and to devote themselves to spiritual pursuits. The men differed, my father says, on whether this new way of life should establish itself in the Land of Israel or rather transform life in the diaspora. Schindler seems to have fulfilled the agricultural part of this vision, without, as far as I can tell, the collective around him that Olim envisioned.

Was Olim a failure? Was Schindler its last or only member?

Schindler was always a rare bird, but in Europe he was also part of the Agudah. Writing in 1975, when an Orthodox Jewish poet was harder to find, my father felt the need to explain to his Orthodox readers that Agudath Israel in Poland was not just—as they assumed—a political organization, guided by a group of religious authorities. Alongside this organization was a tightly connected non-organization of intellectuals, writers, and dreamers.

My father writes about these intellectuals:

They were permanently marginal. Often in silently critical opposition. They had no desire for power, only for spiritual development. They were truly devoted to the Torah, but at the same time they had a solid and comprehensive secular education. Without formal studies or a university degree (at least in Poland), they possessed both knowledge and thought.

Agudah continued – and continues now – as a political organization answering to the rabbinical authorities, to Da’as Torah. But where were and are the marginal counterparts that also formed part of the interwar Agudah world, the intellectuals and poets and dreamers? Did Schindler live on a farm “in silently critical opposition” to the yeshiva nearby?

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It was no surprise that the intellectuals my father described, who inhabited the margins of the Agudah, are also the ones most likely to show up in the history of Bais Yaakov.

Did Schindler write a love song to Bais Yaakov because he identified with the marginality of girls and women in a world dominated by rabbis and activists? Did Bais Yaakov represent a more open field for cultural experimentation than was available in the male sphere?

My father says that Schindler was particularly beloved as a poet in Bais Yaakov. Whatever was going on at the yeshiva, somewhere out of town Bais Yaakov girls were making pilgrimages to the poet and farmer, to hear him sing the song he had written for them.

When Bais Yaakov Girls Commissioned a Sefer Torah

The fact that Bais Yaakov resists any suggestions that it is a feminist phenomenon does not mean that teachers do not have to contend with students pressing to know, for instance, why girls don’t dance with the Torah on Simhas Torah, or even touch it. I was one of those students. When I asked Rebbetzin Bruriah why we couldn’t dance with a Torah on Simchas Torah, when we were spending all our time learning Torah, she responded to by saying, “I do dance, I just dance in my seat.” Torah scrolls just aren’t for girls, however better than their brothers they may be when it comes to knowing it (as opposed to the Talmud, which is the major curriculum in yeshivas). Certainly I never saw a Torah scroll at a Bais Yaakov school or camp. Are there some who have one, not for the men but for the girls and women?

So I was pretty surprised to read a report in a 1933 issue of the Bais Yaakov Journal about a girls’ camp commissioning a Torah scroll:

The Yehudis Camp has its own Sefer Torah written with the support of the students of the Polish Bais Yaakov schools

The Yehudis Association of Warsaw, through the initiative of the school director Mr. Yoel Unger, has undertaken an important initiative, with a material significance for their camp and a spiritual-religious significance for the students of the Bais Yaakov schools in Poland.

Yehudis has undertaken to have its own Sefer Torah written for their summer camp, which will be written in the name of and with the pennies of the Bais Yaakov students throughout Poland.

The mitzvah of writing a Sefer Torah, which only a few individuals have fulfilled, will now be fulfilled by the Bais Yaakov students with their own energies, and at the same time this will raise funds for scholarships for less well-off students to attend the Yehudis Camp.

The article goes on to describe the efforts to raise funds for the Sefer Torah and for scholarships to the camp throughout Poland, with girls buying letters and schools taking the opportunity to teach the laws of the Torah scribe, and the mechanisms of inscribing a Torah. Teachers who raised funds for 200 letters would have their names inscribed on a special plaque in the camp. The installation of the Torah scroll, the report continues, took place beginning on Tu Be’Av in the camp, with festivities, a conference, and other programs going on for three days. As it concludes, the act of collectively inscribing a Bais Yaakov Sefer Torah would certainly create a groundswell of joy and enthusiasm for Bais Yaakov girls, “uniting them in one family, which has one Sefer Torah.”

This is a remarkable story for many reasons, and the report does not answer all my questions.

Did the girls not only fund the Sefer Torah and follow its progress with a sense of collective ownership and pride, but also touch it, hold it, carry it to the Ark?

Was there an Ark?

Did the girls dance?

A rare find of old ephemera. Israel Mizrahi, a dealer and seller of used and antique books, found this flyer among a shipment of books he acquired recently. No more information is available as of yet about the date, events, or people associated with the flyer. The flyer reads:

ATTENTION!
BNOS MEMBERS
THE BAI IS SPONSORING
מנין לבנות
EVERY שבת מברכים AT 9:30 AT THE
AGUDAH BUILDING
436 CROWN STREET (UPSTAIRS)
BET KINGSTON AVE & BROOKLYN AV
FOR 3rd GRADERS & UP
HIGH SCHOOL INCLUDED
REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED
HOPE TO SEE YOU א’ה
THIS שבת

While this flyer is unrelated to the article about the sefer Torah, it leaves us with many similar questions:

What did this minyan look like?

Did girls or women lein from the Torah?

Was there a female ba’alas tefilah or ba’alas koreh in an Agudah building?

A Songbook Come Alive

Among my favorite Bais Yaakov finds in the YIVO archive, and one I discovered almost at the very start of my journey, is Undzer Gyzang: Lider far Bais Yaakov shuln, Basya Farbands, un Bnos Agudath Israel organizatsiyes [Our Song: Songs for Bais Yaakov schools, Basya Unions, and Bnos Agudath Israel organizations], published by the Bais Yaakov Press in 1931. The songbook hardly counts as a book—it’s a stapled pamphlet of seven pages, with lyrics and music for only four songs: “Bais Yaakov gezang,” “Basya lid,” “Antikelekh,” and “Bnos Hymn.” Compared to the Collected Writings of Sarah Schenirer, or the 137 issues of the Bais Yaakov Journal, some of them dozens of pages in length, the pamphlet didn’t at first seem like a major resource for understanding the movement.

It is only in retrospect, years after I first paid a dollar or two to have it reproduced, that I understand this songbook for the treasure that it is. Memoirs and newspaper reports describe the importance of singing in the interwar Bais Yaakov, where girls prayed, sang, and danced together in the school, at special events and gatherings, and on hikes up the mountains during summer programs.

Rachel Feygenberg, an important secular poet and literary critic, described the locals and tourists who would congregate outside the Bais Yaakov of Kalisz on Friday evenings, listening to the voices of young girls singing Lekha Dodi.

On the third of Sivan, when Bais Yaakov celebrated the verse in Exodus that introduced the story of the giving of the Torah on Sinai and from which it derived its own name—‘ko tomar leveit Yaakov vetagid levnai yisrael’ [so shall you say to the House of Jacob and tell to the Children of Israel]—the students sang this verse as they danced in circles around Sarah Schenirer.

These tunes do not appear in the songbook, which records songs composed for the school system and one Yiddish poem set to music. But the songbook provides us with the music and words for another equally innovative feature of the movement: school songs.

While many of the tunes sung in Bais Yaakov were no doubt shared with larger Orthodox circles, three of the songs in the songbook were composed specifically for Bais Yaakov, as part of the burst of literary and organizational creativity that energized the movement in its earliest decades. The fourth, a poem by the Orthodox poet Miriam Ulinover, was apparently set to music for the movement, as well.

School songs are a feature of interwar Bais Yaakov as a “total institution” (as Devorah Weissman described it), which created its own culture of camps, schools, publications, slogans, youth movements, leadership roles and songs. The songbook records a song for Bais Yaakov schools; another song for Basya, the youth movements for young girls; and a third one for the Bnos organization—the youth movement for adolescent girls. Published by the Bais Yaakov Press, it demonstrates the administrative efforts to unite the far-flung chapters and schools under a single banner and aural signature.

Along with the songbook itself, the archives also yield some context on how it came to be. A 1929 issue of the Bais Yaakov Journal announced a competition for the best anthem for the Bnos movement, a contest that was apparently won by Shmuel Nadler, whose “Bnos Hymn” appears in the songbook and was published as well in the journal.

And with the names of these writers and composers in hand, I was able to locate another treasure trove of Bais Yaakov and Agudah material in Yidish un Hsidish, a 1950 poetry and song collection published by Eliezer Schindler, who wrote the “Basya Lid” and “Bais Yaakov gezang.” This later collection includes not only those songs, but also a song for the Tse’irei Agudath Israel boys youth movement, an anthem for the Oylim youth movement, a poem about Sarah Schenirer, and yet another Bnos anthem—one that apparently did not win the prize!

With the 1931 songbook and the Bais Yaakov-related material in Schindler’s 1950 collection, we can now begin to hear something about the movement at its interwar height, rather than only reading words or notes on the page. Of the six or seven songs now in our possession, only one—“Bais Yaakov Gezang”—is still remembered and sung today. As you may notice, the song in the songbook has no chorus. But Dainy Bernstein remembered a rousing chorus, sung by her mother: “Lomir ale geyn in toyres veg’ [Let us all go in the path of Torah]. This chorus, provided through the route of oral transmission, has allowed us to fill in something to which the archive gave us only partial access.

Basya Schechter arranged the songs from Undzer Gyzang, among others Naomi found. She has performed the songs, with other graduates of Bias Yaakov, to accompany several of Naomi’s lectures so far. A larger project of arranging and recording these songs is in process. Basya, in consultation with Naomi, continues to perfect the tunes to best represent and bring to life the songs of Bais Yaakov in interwar Europe.

Below are some moments from Basya’s first performance of these songs, shortly after she began to work on the arrangements, at UPenn in November 2018.

Watch the full video, including Naomi’s lecture, on UPenn’s website. Many thanks to the staff at UPenn for this recording.

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But this complex process, of archival discovery bolstered by living memory, describes the enterprise of Bais Yaakov history writ large. So much is so passionately remembered, and yet, so much is still lost or lies forgotten in the archive. The Bais Yaakov Project hopes to mine both types of memory in bringing to life the “antikelekh” of our own history.

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Naomi Seidman

The question I put to him at the end of the talk was why women should want to study the Talmud.

Maybe my failure to fall in love with Talmud is just the result of a deficit in my Jewish education.

But it was also part of my Jewish education that this was no deficit at all.

But what if the effect is not entirely negative? What if gender segregation was also an engine for spiritual energy and community cohesiveness for girls, as it seems to often be for boys and men?

Might there have been another explanation?

It starts:

Recording by Dainy Bernstein supplying the chorus missing from the songbook [with an incorrect word in the verse]:

The Yehudis Camp has its own Sefer Torah written with the support of the students of the Polish Bais Yaakov schools

**The question I put to him at the end of the talk was why women should want to study the Talmud.**

But what if the effect is not entirely negative?

What if gender segregation was also an engine for spiritual energy and community cohesiveness for girls, as it seems to often be for boys and men?