Naomi Seidman

Tracing the Map of Agudah, on a Motorcycle

During the interwar period, Bais Yaakov embraced a far more diverse cast of characters than it does today. It was part of the charm of the system that girls from circles that would not ordinarily meet could get to know one another, outside their families and usual contexts. A “skeptic” like Gutta Eisenzweig (Sternbuch), who was sent to the Krakow Teachers’ Seminary by her concerned Orthodox parents (she was soon won over by the brilliance and compassion of Yehuda Leib Orlean, the director), met young women who had left their secular homes to “return” to Orthodoxy. At the seminary, daughters of Hasidic leaders studied and lived alongside the daughters of heads of Lithuanian yeshivas as well as ambitious young women from more modest families who had won a scholarship to attend.

Agudath Israel, the political organization of world Orthodox Jewry, was similarly diverse, originating in an alliance that brought together neo-Orthodox Jews from German lands with leaders of the various factions of East European Orthodoxy. In the Agudah, a Hasid like Tuvia Horowitz could meet a German visionary baal-teshuva like Nathan Birnbaum, or a Munich-based poet like Eliezer Schindler. Agudah provided a home not only for rabbis, activists and administrators, but also for artists, visionaries, and poets.

The encounter between East and West that gave birth to the Agudah and was so central to the development of interwar Orthodox culture gave rise to a particular form of travel: the journeys of western Orthodox Jews to the East European heartland, to witness the richness of life in Poland and the fascinating new experiments that were part of interwar Orthodoxy.

Bais Yaakov was a major feature of this landscape, and the educated and passionate young women at the heart of the movement attracted admiration and attention from a wide range of “tourists” and “distinguished guests.”

Even secular writers and journalists were curious.

In the town of Kalisz people gathered outside the local school to hear the girls sing the Kabbalat Shabbat service. The Yiddish press has many stories of visitors from abroad, including the United States, who would witness examinations and graduations, marveling at the students’ erudition and piety. Even more picturesque was the sight of girls and young women learning Torah under the trees in Rabka and other summer colonies, and we know that rabbis from both east and west were regularly invited to see them in action.

Bais Yaakov is a different phenomenon now, less of a pioneering experiment and more an attempt to solidify the enormous gains Orthodoxy has made in recent decades. The schools themselves, especially in urban centers, are more homogeneous in the populations they serve. But there are still colorful characters at the margins of this scene, particularly among those who take an active interest in the interwar history of the Agudah and Bais Yaakov.

If you don’t believe me, it’s because you haven’t met Robbert Baruch. Robbert contacted me a few months to correct an error I had made in the book. (This is one major way I get to meet readers, and no—I don’t mind being corrected, particularly by someone as interesting and generous as Robbert!) I had misdated a map of Bais Yaakov schools in the book, basing my date on the publication year of the book in which it had appeared (1934).

As it turns out, Robbert knew a lot more about the map than just its correct date.

The map was produced in conjunction with a 1931 tour of Poland taken by eighteen men associated with the Agudah and its educational foundation, Keren HaTorah. The tour, which set out from Vienna in late July, visited the major points of Orthodox interest in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Lithuania, meeting with such luminaries as the Chofetz Chayim and seeing the impressive new Yeshivat Chochmei Lublin.

They also visited the old and new seminary buildings in Kraków, meeting there with Sarah Schenirer, and stopped also in Rabka, the spa town south of Kraków that was the site of the Bais Yaakov summer professionalization program.

A report on the 1931 Agudah trip in the May 1995 issue of The Jewish Observer, the contemporary Agudath Israel of America’s publication which ran from 1963 to 2009.

So why was Robbert so interested in this tour?

When I spoke with him a few days ago, he explained that he was raised in a Dutch-Jewish Communist family, in which the Holocaust was both ever-present and unspoken. As a young adult, he sought out Jewish life, soon turning to Jewish student activism where he rose through the ranks, eventually working with Jewish student groups in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Poland. He spent a few years in Israel, studying first at Tel Aviv University and then at Yeshivat Machon Meir. Back in the Netherlands, he earned a degree in political philosophy, worked in local politics, established himself as a lobbyist for the European music industry, married, and had kids.

But in the summers, when his children go off to Habonim summer camp, he gets on his motorcycle and spends a few weeks of his vacation on the road.

*From Robbert Baruch's Facebook page:* March 27th, 1939 - December 30, 2018. Same location, same family. From right to left: Martha Baruch, her father Abraham (Robbert's great-grandfather), her husband Horst Galley, her mother Berta Baruch - Jacobsohn (Robbert's great-grandmother) and Anselm Galley. Hans and Berta had fled from Göttingen after their shop in the Dustere Strasse had been destroyed by Nazi mobs and Martha, Horst and Anselm were thrown out of Vienna, had spent some time in Ascona, Switserland but were extradited and were now in Antwerp a few weeks before they could sail to Quito, Ecuador. After Quito they landed in New York. Robbert has a large number of their letters. Bertha הי״ד and Abraham הי״ד were in the 11 May 1943 transport from Westerbork to Sobibor where they were killed on arrival.

One of the first and longer ones of these trips, in 2014, was to Sobibor, where his great-grandparents and other members of his family were murdered. In the summers since then, the trips also included a historical element: He followed both the Eastern and Western fronts of WWII, traveled through Gallipoli, traced the history of the Spanish civil war where an uncle fought in the International Brigades, and toured the Jewish landmarks of North Africa.

Day 7 of Robbert Baruch’s 2014 summer trip. View on YouTube for a playlist of his trip.

This summer, he is tracing the 1931 tour of Eastern Europe undertaken by those eighteen men (and led by a cousin of mine, David Turkel). He intends to go to every town they visited, admire every natural landmark they mention, see every building that still stands.

He has pored over the existing accounts of the trip, which have some interesting discrepancies. He will have a video camera on his helmet, and he will also be followed by a drone. The trip, “From Vienna to Vilna,” can be followed on Robbert’s Facebook page, and we hope to keep tabs on him through the Bais Yaakov Project website, as well.

When I asked him what he expects to find of a world so thoroughly destroyed, Robbert answered that he never knows what he will find before he sets out. But something always comes up—he’ll meet someone who knows someone who can tell him a story, or show him someplace he should see. In any case, something important and unexpected always happened.

He added that he intends to spend the first Shabbat of his trip in Kraków, but isn’t sure where. If you’re there, and see him around, say hello from me.

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.

When a Book Is Not Really Done

There’s something a little ambivalent and paradoxical about the process of seeing a book you’ve worked on for years finally appear in print. It’s certainly gratifying to finish a book and watch it take its first steps in the (largely indifferent) world.

But the moment a book comes out is also the moment it comes to an end for you. Whatever drove you during those long years of megalomaniacal obsession, of excruciating attention to footnotes and copyeditor comments has been laid to rest.

The book, if you’re exceedingly lucky, might attract interest, controversy, reviews, a promotion.

But for you, the writer, the book is essentially dead. People who approach you with new information, who dispute your insights or congratulate you, are too late to do the book any good.

Whatever readers might feel, for you it’s on to the next thing.

I’ve experienced this not entirely unpleasant feeling with each of the three books I’ve written—a withdrawal of libidinal, intellectual interest in the topic of the book (however invested I remained in the book’s career and Amazon ranking) at the very moment of publication.

Good luck, baby, you’re on your own!

Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition

But something very different is happening with my fourth book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition.

Far from having moved on, my obsession with this topic is only continuing to grow, with no end in sight. The book has been out for a month or two, but rather than enjoying a break from imagining that there is no more important thing to think about than the history of Orthodox girls’ education, rather than turning my attention to the next obsession in line, here I am, busier than ever with Bais Yaakov.

The book somehow morphed a few months ago into something we’re calling, a little grandly, “The Bais Yaakov Project.” And it’s no longer mine alone.

What it is: A website, beautifully designed and maintained by Dainy Bernstein, where we continue to post documents, photos, publications, blogs, videos—anything related to Bais Yaakov.

“The Bais Yaakov Project” also has a musical component, revolving around a 1931 songbook I found years ago in the archives, now coming alive in the cool arrangements of Basya Schechter. In two weeks, Basya and I will spend five days in Boulder, Colorado, at a workshop called “Archive Transformed,” which brings together scholars and artists to produce public programs.

“The Bais Yaakov Project” has taken an even more ambitious turn. Next month, the filmmaker Pearl Gluck and I are spending a few days together brainstorming how to turn this material into a documentary film, and how to fund such a film.

This passion that I thought was my own private obsession, it turns out, has greater reach. All of us—Dainy, Basya, Pearl and I—spent time at Bais Yaakov (more specifically, Bais Yaakov of Boro Park).

All of us went on to other things, but never, it turns out, entirely left Bais Yaakov behind.

The years I spent reading old microfiche copies of the Bais Yaakov Journal were interesting (okay, also often not so interesting).

But they were nothing compared to what I felt in March, rehearsing for the concert of interwar songs of Bais Yaakov along with a group of other ex-Bais Yaakov girls, at the book launch at the Center for Jewish History. Some of the songs we sang were probably being sung for the first time in fifty or seventy years. What happened during that rehearsal was deep, and I want some more of whatever it was.

Rehearsal for the March 24, 2019, event at YIVO. Video: John Schott.

So why is this book not over, just at the point that the other books were done?

What accounts for this different trajectory, this powerful afterlife?

Part of it is that, unlike my other projects, Bais Yaakov is such a real and continuing part of the world today. A history of the movement matters to a lot more people than other things I’ve written about.

What Bais Yaakov was and is remains an open, unsettled, and controversial question. Bais Yaakov treasures its own history, but also works to (partially) obscure those aspects of its history that don’t jibe with present ideological impulses and its present realities (sleeves, for instance, are photoshopped onto old photos to make them conform to present modesty standards, as Leslie Ginsparg Klein highlights). This is rich and charged territory to be barging into, and I’m hopeful and curious about the effects of my work for more than just the usual reasons of scholarly narcissism.

There is also another reason that this research project continues to be alive to me. The history of Bais Yaakov, it turns out, resides at least as much in private memory as it does in the library and archive, and it was only by writing the book that those private resources have become available to me. The illustrations in my book come from various archives, but since knowledge of the book has begun to circulate, I have suddenly found myself with far more material than I had while I was writing it.

The most extensive and richest of these resources is the private collection of Devorah Epelgrad Cohn. Her grandson Naftali Cohn, a professor at Concordia University, contacted me after seeing a posting for a book talk I was giving at the university. We have only begun to post the photos, speeches, and videos he gave us access to, which provide glimpses of a world I was otherwise unable to find in the archives:

a lovely photo of seminary girls lounging on the grassy strip between the Krakow Teachers’ Seminary and the Vistula River that flowed beside it,
a Seminary diploma from 1934,
a photo of seminary girls on vacation in a cart AND the destination of that cart-ride—a beautiful lake high in the Tatar mountain range,
a beautiful shot of the interior of the sixth-grade classroom of the Bais Yaakov of Slonim,
a photo of a class play called “Cantonists,”
and many others.

And if that were not enough, Devorah Cohn carefully labeled these precious artifacts, wrote about her recollections of the events they recorded, and has been videotaped discussing these photos.

Any one of these photos would have made it into the book, and I would have loved to have the one of the girls in the mountains as the cover photo. It’s too late for the book, but the website continues to grow, and along with it my fascination with Bais Yaakov.

The history and ongoing life of Bais Yaakov is a collective story to tell, and the story I have told is only one among many others.

My perspective is not less legitimate because it has been shaped by my leaving the Orthodox world, but certainly my book cannot remain the only serious academic monograph on Bais Yaakov. Important work is being done by Polish historians (many of them feminists), work that is almost entirely unknown in North America.

A number of excellent theses and dissertations by Orthodox historians surely deserve more attention.

It’s a sign of the richness and importance of the history of Bais Yaakov that it has attracted interest in such disparate quarters, far beyond the academic conferences that I thought were the limits of my scholarly reach. With the publication of my book, I have a front-row seat on a busy intersection of the present and the past, Bais Yaakov girls and radical feminist songwriters and filmmakers, Orthodoxy and academic scholarship, Poland and North America and Israel. Whatever happens, I’m not ready to quit this arena.

The work—our work—is only beginning.

When Bais Yaakov Girls Were Movie Stars

On February 22, 1933, the Yiddish daily Hayntige nayes published a news report with the eye-catching title: “The Agudah Is Making Its Own Films: It aims to turn Bnos-Yaakov girls into movie stars.” As the story described this remarkable decision:

The Agudah in Poland is continually instituting new reforms in its ultra-Orthodox program.

Not long ago a rabbinic decision was issued allowing the Bais Yaakov schools to produce public performances, on the condition that only girls would perform and that no boys would be permitted in the audience, not even members of the “Tse’irei Agudath Israel” (the youth movement for boys).

But now the Agudah has taken notice of the fact that the Bnos girls, graduates of Bais Yaakov schools, often go to the movies and they’re more familiar with the names of actresses than of rabbis or Hasidic leaders.

What happened was that a teacher at the Bais Yaakov school on Twarda Street in Warsaw asked the girls in class who the most famous woman in the world was—intending for the girls to answer, “Frau Sarah Schenirer,” the founder of the Bais Yaakov schools in Poland.

But the girls guessed Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and when they saw that the teacher was unhappy with these answers, one girl called out:

“Teacher, I know.”

“So, who?” asked the teacher.

“Hanka Ordonówna! . . .”

The whole episode might have been swept under the rug if not for the unfortunate circumstance that, on another occasion, a delegation of visitors had come to see the school: Meshulam Kaminer with a whole group of German Agudah activists on a tour of Poland.

When they put various questions to the pupils, in order to show the distinguished guests how well versed they were in Yiddishkeit, the pupils demonstrated their ability to translate the “Asher Yatzar” blessing into Yiddish, that they knew all the laws of Sabbath and holidays, and so on. Suddenly, just as the group was about to leave, it occurred to R. Meshulam Kaminer to ask the children: “Who is the most famous person in Poland, aside from Marshall Pilsudski?” intending for the pupils to answer, “the Gerer Rebbe.”

But somehow, because of the working of some kind of spiteful spirit, he was met with a rain of answers, God help us.

Among the names that rang out: Ramón Novarro, John Gilbert, and others. That very evening a special meeting of Agudah administrators was convened, and it was decided that the Agudah would have to make films itself, so that the girls wouldn’t have to go to the immoral movie theaters.

There were even a few who recommended that the famous film “Exodus” [or the 1923 film “The Ten Commandments”?] and other such historical types of films be screened in Bais Yaakov schools, although it was ultimately decided that those films had been made in too Catholic a spirit.

That was why the Agudah has now decided to make its own film, under the supervision of the executive committee of the Agudah and the Council of Torah Sages.

The script revolves around the legend of the ShaCh’s daughter, from the time of the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1649).

Only girls will take part in the film.

Reports have it that filming is about to begin on this first Agudah film.

The Agudah has already made arrangements with the Agudath Israel in the United States to secure financing for the film, and a number of scenes will be shot in the Holy Land, which is why Frau Sarah Schenirer set sail for Palestine a few days ago.

All of this was soon enough relayed to the Belzer Rebbe, and we have received reports of his plan to issue a prohibition on family sending their daughters to Bais Yaakov schools, since these schools turn Jewish children into little Christians.

This story, I am truly sorry to say, is almost certainly a complete fabrication.

The giveaway is the detail about Sarah Schenirer setting sail for the Holy Land. Much to her abiding regret, she never managed a trip there. The article appears to be an elaborate joke, catering to the bottomless appetite among readers of the popular Yiddish press for details of the fascinating experiment that was Bais Yaakov. It is also obviously written by someone who knew Bais Yaakov well—the report manages to be both absurd in its main premise and entirely plausible in every detail.

What it got right:

There was a Bais Yaakov on Twarda Street;
Meshulam Kaminer, a local Agudah activist and newspaper publisher, was heavily involved in Bais Yaakov of Warsaw;
German neo-Orthodox leaders were indeed frequent visitors in Bais Yaakov;
Bais Yaakov pupils, including the ones in the Twarda Street school, were often asked to perform their Jewish knowledge for visitors from abroad;
Bais Yaakov was famous for its plays;
permission for public performance was granted to girls on the condition that only girls performed, and that boys were kept from attending (we also have another newspaper report describing Tse’irei Agudah as working security at one such play, and allowing themselves to enter the auditorium and enjoy the play);
Sarah Schenirer wrote scripts for five or six plays, and herself loved the Polish theatre, as her diary attests;
United States as the source of funding: well, where else would financial support come from? Bais Yaakov sent R. Tuvia Horowitz to the US in 1928 to raise $25,000 for the Kraków Teachers’ Seminary Building, which opened in 1931.
the Belzer Rebbe, after granting Schenirer an initial blessing for her cultural enterprise (the details of which he may not have known), did in fact forbid his followers from sending their daughters to Bais Yaakov, on the grounds that they would encounter girls from less stringently observant homes there—a less dramatic version of the above article’s warning that they would become Christian.

And whether the writer of this report, whom we know only through the initials M.A., knew it, Sarah Schenirer was a descendant of the ShaCh, Rabbi Shabtai Hacohen, who witnessed the events of 1648-49; the script she was supposed to have written narrated the story of the ShaCh’s daughter, and in this sense would have been something of a family biography.

More generally, Bais Yaakov not only fought against the foreign influences of Polish culture, Parisian fashion and Hollywood films, it also did so by providing girls with appealing “kosher” substitutes for these forbidden attractions.

It seems to be the case that the Agudah did not actually make a Bais Yaakov film—but if it had, the newspaper report sets an entirely plausible scenario for how that might have come about, who would have written the script, how funding would have been secured, what the ground rules would have been for such a project, and how the Belzer Rebbe (among others on Bais Yaakov’s right flank) would have reacted.

Or...

…might this story actually be correct, with the one exception of Sarah Schenirer’s journey to Palestine? Might there be an old film reel that can show us these proud and beautiful movie stars? For an archive rat like me, that possibility, remote as it might be, keeps me going in my pursuit.

In the Birnbaum Archives

The great scholar and historian Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi once wrote:

History is the faith of fallen Jews.

But what of Jews who are not fallen? Have they no need for history? Might history be a danger to simple faith, insofar as simple faith rests on the notion that the ways things are now are as they have ever been? If the prohibition against publishing photos of women is a new stringency (which of course it is), the archives might provide us with evidence of that. And with many glorious photos of girls and women.

If Orthodoxy has sometimes been remiss in seriously engaging with its own history (where, for instance, was the English translation of Sarah Schenirer’s writings, all these years?), the secular and academic world have not exactly placed this history at the top of their agenda. The Orthodox press has barely begun to be digitized on such websites as JPRESS; the Yale Jewish Lives series passed on the opportunity to publish a biography of Sarah Schenirer (Sarah who?); and we still have only a few serious studies of, for instance, the Agudah.

There are, though, a lot more historians in the Orthodox world than you might think, including many passionate independent scholars, amateurs in the etymological sense of that term. I’ve met most of them only online, where a kind of fellowship of web surfers and auction-house treasure hunters thrives. But where a treasure hunter might be hoarding their gold, these new friends are eager to share what they have found.

That so far, the historians of Bais Yaakov are mostly men, and all—as far as I know—Orthodox, tells me something precious about what history might still occasionally mean in the Orthodox world, and how the story of girls’ Torah education might inspire men, as well. I owe these friends more than I can say (I also owe a few of them copies of my book—which I’m sending out this week!).

And then there is David Birnbaum, the uncrowned king of this secret fellowship of historians.

In the basement of a modest house in the Orthodox neighborhood of Toronto, David (a retired architect and city planner), with the help of his brother Eleazar (professor emeritus of Turkish literature and history at the University of Toronto), has assembled an astonishingly rich, beautifully organized archive of their family history. Which is to say, an archive of Jewish history in the twentieth century, since the Birnbaum family seems to have been everywhere in this history:

Nathan Birnbaum, coiner of the term Zionism, convener of the 1908 Czernowitz Conference, philosopher, general secretary of Agudath Israel beginning in 1919;
Solomon Birnbaum, professor of Yiddish at the University of Hamburg, the University College London scholar who authenticated and dated the Dead Sea Scrolls;
Uriel Birnbaum, artist and illustrator;
Menachem Birnbaum, artist and literary critic;
Jacob Birnbaum, founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.

In a word, not your average family archive.

There was a lot to see, during the too few hours I spent in the archive, including a letter from Solomon thanking my parents for hosting Jacob at our house in Boro Park over a Jewish holiday when Jacob was touring the shuls, trying to rouse the interest of the frum world in the plight of Soviet Jewry. (My father, Hillel Seidman, who had been an Agudah activist in interwar Poland, was an admirer of Jacob Birnbaum and of the Birnbaum family, more generally. He also supported Jacob’s cause and helped introduce him to the Boro Park community in the 1960s.)

But I was mostly there to see what the archives had to say about Bais Yaakov.

Nathan Birnbaum became interested in Orthodoxy in 1911-12, and was fully observant by about 1916, bringing his family along with him into the Orthodox world (where they remain). Nathan was not content to be religious; he also wanted to transform Orthodoxy, to restore its sense of pride in tradition. He believed that observant Jews were losing their passion, along with their self-confidence in their religious choices.

It was with these ideas in mind that he founded a collectivist movement called “Olim” (the “Ascenders”), which he hoped would reinvigorate the religious world.

Nathan and Solomon (Shloyme) Birnbaum, the most famous baalei tshuva (“born-again” Orthodox Jews) affiliated with Agudah, were figures of fascination throughout interwar Orthodoxy. But nowhere was this truer than in Bais Yaakov.

Bais Yaakov itself was a kind of ba’al tshuva movement, bringing girls “back” to tradition rather than—as with their male counterparts—continuing the ways of generations past.

Bais Yaakov was also more open, in general, to German-Jewish influence, including teachers and administrators from German-speaking lands in ways that would have been unthinkable in Eastern European yeshivas.

And as a new, revolutionary movement, it was open to the revolutionary influences propagated by the Birnbaums, including Shloyme’s attempt to standardize an Orthodox Yiddish orthography, pronunciation and style, in opposition to YIVO’s secular and Lithuanian-inflected standardization.

Bais Yaakov adopted not only his Yiddish textbook but also his Orthodox Yiddishism, calling in 1929 for girls to speak only Yiddish, in the traditional Polish pronunciation, and to take back their Jewish names.

A letter from Sarah Schenirer to Shloyme Birnbaum (below) preserved in the archive describes, among other subjects, the difficulty of an older generation to accept and learn the rules of his new orthography, even if this orthography also presented itself as a return to older Yiddish traditions.

So, too, did Bais Yaakov appreciate the beautiful style of Uriel Birnbaum, commissioning him to design the cornerstone of the Kraków Seminary building and the document commemorating the cornerstone laying ceremony in September 1927. This stone and document are buried not in the archives but rather under the building, which still stands today.

But there are many other treasures in the Birnbaum family archive, which faithfully preserves aspects of Orthodox history for historians in generations to come.

Was Bais Yaakov a Feminist Movement?

In 1934, the Agudah secured the right to distribute a share of certificates for immigration to Palestine, from Zionist organizations that had previously controlled them. But the certificates were precious and competition for them was intense. After negotiations between various groups and the Gerer Rebbe, it was decided that only young men would be awarded certificates.

Activists from Bnos, a branch of Agudah and Bais Yaakov catering to girls, were enraged, since they had participated in the struggle to win the distribution rights.

In the course of this controversy, a Bnos leader published an angry article in the Bais Yaakov Journal, protesting the compromise as a “gentlemen’s agreement” (she used the English term) to exclude the young women.

Despite this strong language, the article insisted that Bnos was not trying to fight for “equal rights.” Rather, they were following the lead of the Torah itself, in the story of the daughters of Zelophehad (Bamidbar/Numbers 27) who demanded that they, too, be given a share in the Land of Israel, since their father had died with no male heir. It was the Torah, not those foolish fight for equal rights, that was driving their struggle.

So, was Bais Yaakov a feminist movement?

“Outsiders” might think so, but “insiders” understood it differently.

According to the understanding of “insiders” of the Bais Yaakov movement, Sarah Schenirer was just doing what was necessary to keep girls from abandoning religion, and in this pious effort she never took a step without first consulting the Torah giants of her day. She was a modest and simple woman who wouldn’t dream of “fighting for equal rights”!

I’ve also heard it said that there’s no point of talking about whether Bais Yaakov is feminist, since feminism was not a part of the cultural horizon when it emerged. Bais Yaakov was and is totally different from recent feminist iniatives—women’s prayer groups and Talmud study, women rabbis or Maharats or halachic advisors (yo’atzot halacha), or such organizations as the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, etc. Bais Yaakov never looked to argue with rabbinic authorities or do anything other restore traditional Judaism.

The strongest defense of Sarah Schenirer against the implication that she was a revolutionary I have read is in an article by Rabbi Avraham Yosef Wolf (founder of the Bais Yaakov Seminary in Bnai Berak) titled “Did Sarah Schenirer Innovate in Any Way?”

As you may have guessed, the answer in Rabbi Wolf’s article was no. If she seemed to have done things that were new, it was only with great regret, and “the hope of restoring the previous situation.”

The defense of Bais Yaakov against the accusation of feminist intentions has some weak links.

Leslie Ginsparg Klein has pointed out that Sarah Schenirer took lots of steps without first consulting Torah Sages, and some of the rabbis who are regularly mentioned as having permitted Torah study for girls (most famously the Chofetz Chayim) only did so after Bais Yaakov was a well-established fact.

As for Sarah Schenirer’s alleged nostalgia and regret:

There is no sign in her writing that Sarah Schenirer considered the Bais Yaakov movement an “unfortunate necessity,” the language that is everywhere in the rabbinic discussion about it. She spoke with passion and enthusiasm about teaching girls Torah, never to my knowledge mentioning the Talmudic prohibition against it. She praised the youth and enthusiasm of the Bais Yaakov teachers and Bnos “pioneers.” Speaking of the founding of the Agudah women’s movement, Neshei Agudath Israel, she wrote of the Orthodox woman “awakening from her long sleep” and finally “stepping foot on the world stage.”

Speaking of the founding of the Agudah women’s movement, Neshei Agudath Israel, she wrote of the Orthodox woman “awakening from her long sleep” and finally “stepping foot on the world stage.”

Finally, feminism was a much bigger part of the world in which Bais Yaakov emerged than it is in our own time, even if the terms are a little different: Women received the right to vote in Poland in 1918, two years before the United States, in a culture teeming with debates about suffrage, equal rights, feminine nature—more generally, “The Woman Question.” In this environment, Bais Yaakov felt compelled to defend Jewish tradition from charges of oppressing women, and nearly every issue of The Bais Yaakov Journal included an article on such questions as “Judaism and the Modern Women,” or “Rabbinic Attitudes toward Women’s Rights.”

Bais Yaakov had a complicated stance in regard to women’s suffrage.

In principle, the Agudath Israel, which oversaw the movement, was against women’s suffrage, a stance relevant mostly to kehillah (Jewish community) elections—and they succeeded in keeping women from voting in these community elections throughout the interwar period.

But the reality was that women did have the vote, and the Agudah was also a political party and had to court these votes.

Along with various secular feminist challenges, the Agudah also had to face Orthodox feminists like the German-Jewish activist Bertha Pappenheim, who demanded that the Agudah find a way to free the agunah, the woman “chained” to a missing or recalcitrant husband.

In short, there was no way for Orthodox writers and activists to ignore the challenges posed by feminists, either in confrontations with those they might consider outsiders or in retaining the loyalty of those still on the inside.

....there was no room for the fight for equal rights, since Judaism was a religion of obligation rather than rights, and men and women alike served a higher law...

In articles that responded to feminist challenges, the writers in the Bais Yaakov Journal insisted that Bais Yaakov was not a feminist movement. In a Torah lifestyle, there was no room for the fight for equal rights, since Judaism was a religion of obligation rather than rights, and men and women alike served a higher law. These obligations were different for men and women, but this was a wise recognition of the different natures of men and women. To sweeten the pill, writers emphasized the beautiful and harmonious marriages in which husband and wife performed their traditional roles.

In short, the response of Bais Yaakov to the challenge of modern feminist was to argue for the superiority of Jewish tradition over modern notions of gender equality.

While this was the official line (and still is), there were many aspects of Bais Yaakov that strike at least my eye as feminist. The Bnos argument about their right to certificates, whether it was grounded in political theory or Torah, ended up with their victory. That very year, 1934, the first Bnos Kibbutz (as the groups preparing for immigration to Palestine were called) arrived in Tel Aviv.

But were they feminists, or rather—as they saw it—passionate and faithful followers of the Torah?

Or do we need some new language, language that can encompass both sides of this divide, that can describe this new breed of young woman with enough knowledge to mine the biblical sources for its proto-feminist moments; mobilize these traditional sources to get what they want and recognize that they deserve; ground their own fight for justice in the language of Torah and tradition?

Bais Yaakov more generally lived in some complicated and maybe self-contradictory space between tradition and feminism.

It forged alliances with feminist movements when such alliances could be strategic: It accepted the support of such avowed feminists as Bertha Pappenheim, who visited the Krakow Seminary in 1935 (just after Schenirer’s death) and consulted on vocational training. It also found support among international organizations fighting the traffic in women (known then as the White Slave Trade), many of them also suffragettes.

But Bais Yaakov kept its distance from Jewish feminist organizations in Poland, who were the dangerous rivals on the ground. At the same time, it had to compete with them, among other ways by opening possibilities for girls and young women. According to the established ideology, these served to prepare them to be wives and mothers. But in the meantime, it also encouraged them to be activists, teachers, travelers, hikers, dancers, artists, writers, and Torah scholars.

So, was Bais Yaakov a feminist movement?
I’d love to hear what you think.

The 93 Martyrs: Bais Yaakov in the Fight Against Traffic in Women

Combing through archives can be a tedious enterprise.

Take the Joint Distribution Committee Archive. It’s a beautiful and useful resource, not to mention freely available online. But some huge proportion of its holdings consist of pleas for money from desperate people, the JDC responses to these supplicants, and internal JDC memos about certain requests. From time to time, someone acknowledges the receipt of a check, or reports on a lost one.

The richest and most interesting material in the archives are the reports from people who received grants. Much of what we know about Bais Yaakov in the interwar period comes from these reports, although like all such reports, they have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes it is not the content of a letter or report that is striking, but something else about the document–a scribbled note in the margins, a surprising letterhead, etc. It was the stationery used for letters sent from London and Vienna that ended up sending me down an entirely unexpected avenue of research into Bais Yaakov.

One such document was a 1937 letter from Jacob Rosenheim, in his capacity as President of the Bais Yaakov Central Committee in London (recently relocated from Vienna), acknowledging receipt of a check for $600 to be allotted to the Cracow Seminary and Ohel Soro in Lodz, the vocational training institute run by Eliezer Gershon Friedenson.

What first caught my eye was the endorsement at the bottom of the page, by Eleanor Roosevelt:

“Nothing I knew about the history of Bais Yaakov explained why Eleanor Roosevelt might have thought to praise the movement.

And why, for that matter, did the line of supporters and committee chairs on the left margin of the stationery include non-Orthodox Jews as Frieda Schiff Warburg (the wife of the banker Felix Warburg, and a member of the American Beth Jacob Committee)? Why would Edith Ayrton Zangwill (the wife of Israel Zangwill), a radical feminist and suffragist, have supported what was after all a traditional movement?

A clue to the appeal of Bais Yaakov in such circles appeared in the letterhead:

Education, sure. But what kind of “protection” did Bais Yaakov provide?

The term “protection” that was used in the letterhead for and descriptions of the Bais Yaakov in Vienna and London (but never, to my knowledge, in Poland), was a genteel reference, I soon realized, to the fight against “the International White-Slave Trade,” the (rather odd and surely due for retirement) term for the transnational sex-traffic networks in which Eastern European Jews were particularly visible participants.

Bais Yaakov entered this arena in 1927, when Dr. Leo Deutschländer met Bertha Pappenheim at a London conference organized by Jewish activists seeking to combat the problem. Pappenheim had long pointed to a lack of Jewish education as chief among the reasons that propelled some girls to abandon their Orthodox homes. It was these girls, she thought, who were particularly susceptible to the “seduction” that was often the first step to a life of sex work.

Bertha Pappenheim was a feminist, and a lifelong observant Jew. The same was true of Flora Sassoon, a wealthy London-based supporter of Bais Yaakov. These women believed in Torah education for women (Flora Sassoon was considered to possess an impressive store of Jewish knowledge), and no doubt saw Bais Yaakov as doing two worthy things: teaching girls Torah, and protecting them from prostitution.

But for others less invested in the spiritual lives of Orthodox girls, the fact that Bais Yaakov was an educational movement was secondary to the role it played in fighting against the sex traffic in Jewish women.

From its side, Bais Yaakov certainly had a motivation to frame its mission in the dramatic narrative of “protecting” rather than merely “educating” Jewish girls. The sex traffic was an international enterprise, and so too was the effort to combat it. It drew in a range of philanthropists and activists in the Jewish world and beyond, and it was this network that Bais Yaakov was able to tap into in its fundraising efforts. These philanthropists may have felt moved by the idea of giving Jewish girls an Orthodox education, but if they were not, other motives might be found for them to open their wallets, including (for Western Jews) the desire to keep shameful Jewish stories off the front page of newspapers.

The girls who attended the schools and seminaries might have been surprised to hear that Western philanthropists and suffragists were supporting their movement in order to keep them from becoming prostitutes. Of course, there was no place in the discourse of Bais Yaakov for allusion to their sexual vulnerability, even in veiled terms. But in New York salons hosted by Mrs. Felix Warburg or in the praise of Eleanor Roosevelt, the already decades-old discussions about how to stop the embarrassing spectacle of Jewish participation in the International White-Slave Trade, and the wonders of Beth Jacob, were two sides of a single fundraising coin.

This curious aspect of Bais Yaakov history in its transnational reach might help explain another lingering mystery about the movement, the “Last Will of the 93 Bais Yaakov Girls,” who killed themselves rather than be taken as prostitutes by German soldiers.

A broad (but not universal) scholarly consensus has asserted that the “will” is a fiction. (See here, here, here, here, and here for some scholarly and popular coverage of the story as myth.) But that hardly settles all the questions raised by this episode. If it was a fiction, then who wrote it, and for what purpose?

I have no more idea who wrote it than anyone, but it was clearly someone with an inside view. The letter itself, perhaps not coincidentally, was addressed to Meir Schenkalewsky, an Agudah activist who moved from Hamburg to the United States in 1934 and lobbied the White House and State Department on behalf of Orthodox causes; it was Schenkalewsky who introduced the “most glorious work of Beth Jacob” to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Could the history of Bais Yaakov fundraising efforts through the well-established channels of anti-prostitution activism help explain the “Last Will and Testament”? Like the letterhead of the Vienna and London offices, this document, too, depicted Bais Yaakov girls as potential prostitutes, and much more explicitly —of course, in vastly more horrific circumstances than anyone in the 1920s and 1930s could have dreamed. This is not a fundraising appeal, and the letter names no committees or benefactors who might be able to step in and “protect” the girls.

But the poignant and glorious spirit of Bais Yaakov that Eleanor Roosevelt had praised is nevertheless at work in this letter, keeping them safe from forced prostitution even within the hell of the Holocaust.

Bais Yaakov, even without the help of London philanthropists, was performing the work it was created to do, and it was to the West that the poignant news of this small triumph was directed.