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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.

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.

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.

Report Card Revelations

What can a few simple report cards tell us about Bais Yaakov schools?
A lot, actually.

One of the purposes of the Bais Yaakov Project website is to foster scholarship of the Bais Yaakov movement – its beginnings, its development, and its current character(s). We collect documents that might seem insignificant at first glance, because researchers can often find significance in the smallest and most banal of items.

Sometimes, an item from the archives is interesting for a tidbit of information it reveals, like the intriguing epigraph from Eleanor Roosevelt on a document from the Central Office of Bais Yaakov that helps us understand the role of Bais Yaakov in a broader context. And sometimes, an item becomes fascinating when compared with other similar items.

Take report cards, for example. A report card can tell us a lot about how a school functioned. We can look at:

What are the subjects listed on the report card?
Which subjects are given a grade? Are any left blank?
Are the subjects all academic, or are non-academic areas given grades as well?
What is the grading system on the report card?
Are attendance and lateness marked?
Does the report card indicate parental involvement?
Does the report card provide room for comments apart from grading?
Is the school year divided into quarters or semesters, etc.?

All of these questions can help us understand how a specific school functioned, what its mission was, and how its function matched its mission.

We can also ask the same questions about report cards from multiple Bais Yaakov schools and multiple time periods. That way, we can build up a data set which we can use for comparisons of various kinds.

We can, for example, compare how Bais Yaakov elementary schools versus Bais Yaakov high schools operate, what subjects and areas they stress, how much parental involvement and student responsibility is expected, etc. We can also compare schools from different geographic areas, asking how Bais Yaakov schools differ from Europe to North America to Israel, or how Bais Yaakov schools in different American cities compare (Brooklyn, Lakewood, Baltimore, “out-of-town,” etc.).

All of these comparisons become significant when we have a bulk of data to compare. The Bais Yaakov Project currently has report cards from only a few individuals, so it’s harder to do a comprehensive survey.

But we can compare two similar report cards from two very different eras – Yocheved Halpern’s Grade 1 report card from Bais Yaakov of Rzeszów, Poland, in 1935; and Esther Shaindel Bernstein’s Grade 1 report card from Bais Yaakov of Boro Park, New York, in 1995. By comparing these two report cards from Bais Yaakov schools separated from each other by 60 years, we can take a preliminary look at how Bais Yaakov changed – or didn’t – over the course of its development.

The very familiarity of the report card shouldn’t obscure the fact of just how innovative the report card was (along with the innovativeness of Bais Yaakov, more generally). Yeshivas and heders didn’t have report cards, and it was a sign of Bais Yaakov’s “modernity” and professionalism that it divided the school day into regular subjects, had a formal curriculum that all Bais Yaakovs were supposed to follow, and had a standardized grading system. These seem to have been borrowed from the Samson Raphael Hirsch schools, which had similar innovations. But apparently Sarah Schenirer herself did not wait for the arrival of German administrators to introduce report cards, since we have a very early one, handwritten and with Schenirer’s signature, for one of her first students, Devorah Teitelbaum.

Below you’ll find images and transcripts of the two report cards: Yocheved Halpern‘s report card from 1935 Poland, and Esther Shaindel Bernstein‘s report card from 1995 Brooklyn. Following the transcription, we’ve sketched out a few significant details. There is a lot more to be said about these report cards themselves, and even more to be said when we have more report cards to add to the study!

We hope this rough study demonstrates the vast information stored in archival documents of Bais Yaakov.

Report Card: 1935, Rzeszów

Seventh-Grade Girls’ School Bais Yaakov in Rayshe
Under the Administration of the Agudath Israel
Certificate
Student: Halpern Yocheved
Class: (pre-first / first)
City: Rayshe
Born: Rayshe, 12 July 1928

School Year 1934-1935	I	II
Jewish Practices	Outstanding
Attitudes towards work	Outstanding
Attitude to surroundings	—-
Interest in studies	Outstanding
Understanding of studies	—
Mastery in the Subjects of:
Prayer	Very good
Meaning of prayer:	—
Pentateuch	—
Judaism	Good
History	—
Grammar	—
Yiddish	Very good
Organization	Very good
Absent hours	6
Late hours	2
Excused absences	6
Signature of the parents

Report Card: 1995, Boro Park, New York

	א (A)	ב (B)	ג (C)	ד (D)
Pentateuch
Understanding the topic
Translating the words
Rashi
Nakh
Understanding the topic
Translating the words
Knowledge and worldviews / ideologies
Judaism
Laws and customs
Meaning of prayer
General knowledge
Torah portion of the week	Excellent	Excellent	Excellent
Prayer and blessings
The Holy Language (Hebrew)
Reading	Excellent	Excellent	Excellent
Penmanship	Very Good	Very Good	Excellent
Spelling
Speech Fluency		Excellent	Excellent
Composition
Grammar
Yiddish
Reading
Spelling
Language
Writing
Behavior and Responsibilities
Care in mitzvos	Satisfactory	Satisfactory	Outstanding
Conduct and derekh eretz	Satisfactory	Satisfactory	Outstanding
Conduct during prayer
Order and cleanliness	Satisfactory	Satisfactory	Outstanding
Class participation	Outstanding	Outstanding	Outstanding
Strives to improve	Satisfactory	Satisfactory	Outstanding
Homework	Satisfactory	Satisfactory	Outstanding
Lateness
Absences

Teacher's Remarks:

Term 1: Esther Shaindel is a sweet and smart girl. She enjoys learning and participates nicely in class.

Term 2: “All good things wrapped in one.” Esther Shaindel is one gem of a student. She makes every day a happy day.

Term 3: (spills over into the space for Term 4) It was a pleasuring [sic] to have Esther Shaindel as a student. She was a great asset to the class. May you continue to see much nachas from her. Have a happy and healthy summer.

Promoted to Grade 2.

Notice that the two report cards have some clear similarities:

Both ask for a parent’s signature (though the 1935 Rzeszów report card is unsigned)
Both split up the year (though the 1935 Rzeszów report card is split into two semesters and the 1995 Boro Park report card is split into four quarters, with the last quarter left blank)
Both provide space to record absence and lateness (though the 1995 Boro Park report card does not record this)
Both use a word-based grading system rather than letters or numbers (although these word-based systems differ)
Both leave some subject areas ungraded (a comparison of upper grade report cards from Bais Yaakov of Boro Park would show that the report card remains the same, and subjects begun in later grades are simply left blank in lower grades)

Some of their subjects are shared:

Pentateuch (Chumash)
Meaning of Prayer
Judaism
Grammar
Yiddish

However, those subjects are broken down into more components in the 1995 Bais Yaakov of Boro Park report card.

Other subjects do not overlap:

Prayer (appears as a subject area in the 1935 Rzeszów report card but as a behavior category in the 1995 Boro Park report card)
Nakh (appears only in the 1995 Boro Park report card, though it is ungraded)
History (appears only in the 1935 Rzeszów report card)

The categories of behavior also differ, as does their placement in the report card: the 1935 Rzeszów report card lists attitudes and interest in studies before the studies themselves, while the 1995 Boro Park report card lists behavior and responsibilities after the studies. This difference is open to interpretation and could indicate a number of things. One possibility is that the Bais Yaakov of Rzeszów in 1935 valued the attitudes more than the studies, and vice versa for the Bais Yaakov of Boro Park in 1995. That is impossible to say conclusively with only one document from each school, however.

The 1995 Boro Park card also provides space for comments, and the comments themselves are worthy of study as well. (I wrote about what comments can indicate on my personal blog.)

Another significant difference is that the 1995 Boro Park report card is accompanied by another report card for secular studies.

This can be understood within the context of how Bais Yaakov started – as a supplementary program which students attended in addition to their state-mandated schools – and how most Bais Yaakov schools exist today – as fully self-contained educational institutions providing both Jewish education and state-mandated education. On the other hand, there was a full-program Bais Yaakov in Rzeszów and it is possible that the report card we have was accompanied by a secular report card that did not survive.

The separation of an individual student’s grades into two separate report cards – one for Jewish studies and one for secular studies – is an indication of the school’s attitudes toward the way Judaism and secular knowledge interact. If we had report cards from other Bais Yaakov schools in 1990-2000 or so, we could ask whether all Bais Yaakov schools separate their curriculum in this way, whether some combine them into a single report card, and what distinguishes the schools who follow one method from schools who follow the other.

Our hope is that Bais Yaakov graduates will loan us their report cards or report cards from their family archives. If we can enrich our collection, we open up the possibility for comparison across time, location, age, and other features of Bais Yaakov schools, gaining a richer understanding of the development of the Bais Yaakov movement.

If you would like to lend your Bais Yaakov materials, or materials from your family collection, please contact us. All materials will be handled with utmost care and returned to you after digitization. Names can be removed from documents, and all addresses and phone numbers will be redacted from documents published to the website.

Book Release

The book that helped inspire this website: Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, by Naomi Seidman, is available for purchase here. Use the discount code in the poster below (ADISTA5).

Discount code valid through May 12, 2019

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.