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Report Card Revelations

March 30, 2019 By DainyBernstein

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

March 25, 2019 By Bais Yaakov Project

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

March 15, 2019 By Naomi Seidman

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.

Acting Like Bais Yaakov Girls

March 11, 2019 By Naomi Seidman

Among the hundreds of oral histories collected by the Spielberg Shoah Foundation are about fifty that mention Bais Yaakov as part of descriptions of life in prewar Poland. The interviewers, who seem to be following a rough script, generally ask what was taught in the schools.

But that might not be the right question.

For many graduates, it’s not what happened inside a classroom that made the most vivid impression, but rather the extra-curricular activities that were part of the Bais Yaakov experience.

In particular: the Bais Yaakov play.

Yaffa Gora relates in her memoir that plays were an important way the movement marketed itself. Bais Yaakov plays were often the most exciting event in a small town, and even girls from irreligious families sometimes pressed their parents to allow them to go to a Bais Yaakov, just for the chance of being in a play. These plays were part of Bais Yaakov culture not only in the small towns. The students at the Teachers’ Seminary in Kraków, for instance, wrote plays–comic sketches–in which girls gently poked fun of their teachers, or of the culture they were helping to create.

Even a student as serious as Vichna Kaplan, as Basya Bender relates, was not above playing the role of a goat in one such play. This was a goat famous in Bais Yaakov circles, hanging around the study groups that formed in the lap of nature in the Bais Yaakov summer colonies.

These plays, with their opportunities for girls to dress as the biblical character of Joseph or one of his brothers, as the Assyrian general Holofornes or the beauteous Judith, as a cantonist drafted into the Tsar’s army or the devastated mother left behind, or as Chana or one of her seven sons, were expansions of what Bais Yaakov was already doing: creating roles for Jewish girls to explore that were both new and traditional (as they were both male and female).

Sure, Bais Yaakov was training girls in the roles of Orthodox teachers, wives, and mothers.

But along the way, the variety of roles that might be filled, characters that might be inhabited, ranged far beyond those three.

Some of the plays, as in the Seminary, were for internal Bais Yaakov audiences. But in the small towns, they tended to be rather elaborate affairs. Rehearsals went on for months, posters around town advertised the performances (“entrance for women only”), and the play was staged in such public venues as movie theaters.

Nor was this entirely amateur theater. We have seven or eight published scripts that Bais Yaakov made available to its school directors, including five by Sarah Schenirer. This much attention to theater could hardly go unnoticed.

Indeed we have many photographs of Bais Yaakov classes in their costumes, and one or two of the sets, as well.

The Yiddish press was fascinated by the phenomenon, and so, apparently, were people who might be expected to be outside the strict orbit of Bais Yaakov theater. At least two newspaper stories in Yiddish dailies report on boys who dressed in women’s clothing in their attempt to sneak into Hanukkah plays. Hanukkah, in addition to Purim, was theater season in Bais Yaakov.

In both these instances, cross-dressed boys in the audience were watching cross-dressed girls onstage. (The accounts may be entirely fictional – the Yiddish press was often sensationalistic and loved juicy stories about Bais Yaakov.) Gender segregation, the mark of the traditionalism of Bais Yaakov, also seemed to invite some of the more free-spirited and radical of its cultural expressions.

The importance of theater in Bais Yaakov culture, both for the participants and those who served as the various audiences and spectators invited by these performances, might explain one of the more curious stories I discovered in the Yiddish press: on February 22, 1933, the Warsaw daily Hayntige Nayes reported that Agudah had undertaken a filmmaking project, with the script written by Sarah Schenirer and the story about the Chmielnitzki Massacres of 1648-49.

The story can hardly be taken at face value: Among the elements that give it away as fiction, or as farce, is the detail that Sarah Schenirer had set sail to scout for locations for the film, which was to be shot in both Poland and Palestine—we know for a fact that Schenirer longed to visit the Land of Israel, but never succeeded. (In the late 1930s, a plan to bring her body to Jerusalem was formulated, without success).

The story, as fantastic as it seems, is not entirely implausible. With so much energy devoted to Bais Yaakov theater, why not film? And who better to write the script than Bais Yaakov’s foremost playwright?

Might a few old reels of such a movie turn up one day in some dusty Polish archive?

Unlike many other aspects of interwar Bais Yaakov, the play is alive and well.

I participated in Bais Yaakov plays s a student in Bais Yaakov Academy in Brooklyn and a camper in Camp “Tubby” Tikhon Bais Yaakov in the 1970s, in the same tradition as the plays from the 1920s and 1930s.

I loved playing a street urchin in The Rothschilds, painting the set for The Diary of Anne Frank, and getting stuck under the stage as Slightly Soiled in Peter Pan (not all the plays were on Jewish themes).

The astonishing story of the founding and growth of Bais Yaakov is regularly staged in schools around the world.

But Sarah Schenirer’s own scripts, like Ḥanah un ihre ziben zuhn : hisṭorishe forshṭelung in eyn aḳṭ, are still available at YIVO and no doubt elsewhere.

Perhaps the time has come for that repertoire to be revived?

Bais Yaakov girls performing in “Listen With Your Heart,” Bais Yaakov High School in Brooklyn, 2005.