Uncategorized

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.

Bais Yaakov in the Olomeinu Magazine

Confession: My area of specialization is not Bais Yaakov. My knowledge of Bais Yaakov’s history comes from my work on this website, in fact. My area of specialization – or at least one of them – is contemporary haredi children’s literature and education. Clearly, there is overlap between the two foci, and that’s why I’ve been working with NaomiSeidman on this project.

Some of the material in the corpus of texts I study is the Olomeinu magazine, published from 1960-2010 by Torah Umesorah. It was marketed to day schools from the beginning, although by the 2000s, the focus had become haredi schools with less attention paid to day schools. That’s part of what I’m tracking in my dissertation.

The process through which I’ve observed this shift is numerous passes through the many issues I have access to, from Torah Umesorah’s incomplete set of scans on their website and from a friend’s loan of her family’s archival collection. I have a spreadsheet where I track the appearance of repeated features, titles, and topics, etc. During this process, I came across one article on Sarah Schenirer. The article is in an issue for which I don’t have the cover, but based on some clues on other pages, I guess that it’s the December 1974 issue. (In the letters that children wrote to the Olomeinu, they mention the previous issues in which they noticed errors. They mention October 1974, November 1974, and Kislev. Since I know that the June 1974 issue was the Tamuz issue, I extrapolated that Kislev matched up with November, which means that the issue in question was Teves/Decemeber 1974. I love this kind of sleuthing!)

The narrative that people tell about their own history is always fascinating. As discussed in other places on this website, the oral tradition that grew up around Sarah Schenirer’s story does not always match the historical records. Not all of the details in the account below are accurate. But it is important to read nonetheless, for what it tells us about how Torah Umesorah in the 1970s thought about the development of Bais Yaakov.

After I noticed that article, I flipped through the rest of the issues I have access to and looked for any pieces that mention Bais Yaakov schools. I found a number of fascinating appearances – some substantial and some brief mentions. I also found two articles about Krakow (spelled Cracow in the Olomeinu), neither of which mentions Bais Yaakov. I found that interesting, because if you mention Krakow to Bais Yaakov girls, they will automatically think of “Sarah, mother of Bais Yaakov.”

Below you’ll find images of the Olomeinu pages on which Bais Yaakov appears. Click each article’s image for an accessible PDF version.

PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS….

Sarah Schenirer: The Seamstress Who Sewed Souls

Article about Sarah Schenirer in Olomeinu (date likely December 1974).

At the beginning of this century, there were no Torah schools for Jewish girls in Eastern Europe. Not only that, but the religious Jews were strongly against the very idea of such schools. Boys must go to yeshiva to learn Torah and girls should stay home to learn from their mothers how to build a Jewish home – that is how everyone felt.

One person felt differently. She was a young girl named Sarach Schenirer. She lived in Cracow, Poland and she workd as a seamstress who kept a diary, read Yiddish translations of seforim, and thought about the girls and women she knew. Modern ideas were coming to Poland. Jewish girls and women couldn’t understand Chumash or sefer, but they were reading all sorts of non-religious and anti-religious books and articles in Polish. A relative once took her to a Jewish girls club for a Friday night lecture – and she was shocked to see one of the lecturers turn on the lights!

Sarah was a good seamstress and she knew how particular some women could be about their clothes. She wrote in her diary, “People care so careful when it comes to clothing their bodies. Why aren’t they just as careful when it comes to the needs of their souls?”

So Sarah decided to do something. She started a school for little girls and became their teacher. Many people made fun of her and some were very angry at what she was doing. What right did she have to do something that had never been done before? Who was this young girl to set up a new educational system? Despite the opposition her little school grew. She even got encouragement from one of the greatest tzaddikim (righteous men) in all the world, the Belzer Rebbe, who blessed her work, After that, she got more and more help, especially from Eliezer Gershon Friedenson, an Agudath Israel leader and well-known editor who convinced many other leaders that Sarah Schenirer was right.

Requests began to pour in from other cities: “Please open a school for our girls, too,” She would sometimes leave Cracow for a while to organize such schools. Later on she was forced to graduate her senior class and send them to operate Bais Yaakov schools – that’s what she called them – when they were still in their middle teens. At the suggestion of Rabbi Meir Shapiro she took the next major step – she opened a seminary to train teachers. In the first year, she had a hundred and twenty students!

Sarah Schenirer’s success proved to everyone that there was a tremendous need for Bais Yaakov schools for girls. Nowadays there is hardly anyone who would say she was wrong; if anything there should have been many more people doing the same thing.

What is truly amazing about Sarah Schenirer is that she was absolutely self-taught, yet she was a amarvelous teacher, a fine writer, and an inspiring speaker. Her students were her children- she had no children of her own – and many of them devoted their lives to following her example. Most of her students died under the Nazis and they dies like true heroines. They were unafraid and loyal to Hashem. Once ninety-three of them were about to die. They smuggled out a last letter that ended this way,

“We are not afraid at all. We have only one plea from you: say Kaddish for ninety-three Jewish girls. In a little while, we shall be with our mother, Sarah Schenirer.”

A concentration camp survivor told of a Bais Yaakov student who nursed people in a concentration camp urging them to eat the non-kosher food, even giving away her own small ration to others who were sicker and weaker than she. When she finally dies, it was known that she had never eaten anything that wasn’t kosher.

Saraha Schenirer died on 26 Adar 5695 (1935) when she was only fifty-two years old. That was forty years ago, but she is still alive in every Bais Yaakov school in the world.

Two articles mentioning Krakow without Bais Yaakov:

Dainy Bernstein is a PhD Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, finishing their dissertation, “Chanoch La’Na’ar: American Haredi Children’s Literature and Education, 1980-2000.” They teach composition and literature at Lehman College.

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.

When Plans Go Awry

The Bais Yaakov Project Team is a continuously-growing group of people associated with Bais Yaakov in many ways. Most of us are graduates of a Bais Yaakov school, spanning multiple schools and multiple decades. Some members on the team – Naomi Seidman and Leslie Ginsparg Klein most notably – are experts on Bais Yaakov after years of research and publishing on the topic. Some of us, though, are only tangential experts.

Take me, for example. My primary area of research is not Bais Yaakov. My PhD work is on ideologies of childhood and education as represented in literature. I write about this topic as it relates to multiple time periods and cultures: medieval Britain; medieval Ashkenaz; contemporary children’s historical fiction; and, most notably as my dissertation, contemporary haredi children’s literature. I became involved with the Bais Yaakov Project after connecting with Naomi and talking about our shared passions of understanding histories of education and our shared concern over the lack of available sources documenting haredi education.

We also had a mutual connection, Shira Schwartz, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, writing about “Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction.”

Shira and I had once dreamed about someday, when we weren’t grad students trying to get our dissertations done, creating an online repository of documents from Bais Yaakov schools and yeshivas so that others who work on these subjects after us could have an easier time. When Naomi talked about all the material she had collected from multiple sources as she worked on her book, it was the perfect shidduch – I had already been thinking about what an online repository could look like, and we immediately got started on building a website.

For fields like ours, where the focus is on attitudes and approaches to education, it’s important not to rely only on sources like official school reports or official school publications. Sources like student publications, class notes, and teachers’ lesson plans are equally as important. They demonstrate what happened in schools in great detail, while official documents tend to provide a much broader picture.

Of course, these sources of detailed and minute evidence are also among the first to disappear. As I wrote about previously, ephemera like class notes can show us how teachers conducted their lessons and how students received them.

For today’s peek into the archives, I want to highlight what we can glean about the structure and ideology of schools from a lesson plan book. The pages I’m focusing on today comes from my own lesson plan book, from my years teaching Grade 8 English Language Arts in Bais Yaakov of Boro Park (2007-2009).

For two years after I graduated from Yavne Seminary in Cleveland, I taught alongside my own teachers in the institution where I had once been a student. Each week, I submitted a page to Miss Carmie Homburger, who had been my principal when I was in 8^th grade, outlining what I planned to teach that week. My usual weekly plan included literature on Mondays and Tuesdays; grammar on Wednesdays; and writing on Thursdays.

The page from my lesson plan book showing the week of March 24-27.

When I extricated my lesson plan book from my boxes of old papers in order to scan and upload it for the Bais Yaakov Project website, I was struck by the way I often updated the lesson plans to keep track of what actually happened in class.

As all teachers know, what we plan often isn’t what ends up happening in class. But the paper documentation doesn’t always reflect the reality of what transpired. For the week of March 24-27 in my lesson plan book, though, I took care to record the “real” lesson.

The carbon-generated plan, the one that I handed in to my supervisor, indicates a focus on Flowers for Algernon on Monday and Tuesday; grammar on Wednesday; and writing on Thursday. The ink column, titled “REAL,” shows what actually happened in class, and the reason the lesson diverged from what I had planned.

On Tuesday, one of my classes did not meet because they had a gym period instead. And on Thursday, another class had a gym period. Now, since I’m working with my own documents here, I can draw on my memories to fill in the blanks.

In New York State, schools are mandated to provide physical education. Bais Yaakov of Boro Park, since it receives government funds for programs like transportation, textbooks, and special education, is bound by those laws and regulations. But the Bais Yaakov school day would need to be lengthened even more, past its 4pm dismissal time, if Phys Ed were a class scheduled regularly like any other.

Instead, the school crafted a system where each class of students would miss one afternoon period a week for “gym,” rotating among the four periods so each teacher would give up one lesson a week per class.

And I had forgotten to account for the two classes who would be missing my period for the week of March 24-27.

The page from my lesson plan book showing the week of October 29-November 1.

Accounting for the change in schedule involved a simple shifting around of plans. Usually, the school would schedule all three of my classes for gym the same week, so that I could count on all three classes missing one day. That would make my rescheduling of lesson plans easier.

Of course, even without the occasional hitch in schedule – accounting for things like assemblies and gym – classes all moved at different paces, and you can see that difference in the more regular lesson plans as well.

When we work with documents that are older than mine, and whose creators are no longer able to provide context via their memories and oral accounts, we’re left to guess at what happened in each document. And the more documentation we have, the better our chances of guessing right become!

Later this week, we’ll be uploading scans of a curriculum plan from a school in Toronto. As I hope this peek into the archives makes clear, planbooks and curricula indicate an ideal, but plans often go awry. Looking at the original plan and the ultimate outcome together helps us get a more complete picture of what Bais Yaakov schools look like and value.

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?

Play Video

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.