Sarah Schenirer was the founder of the Bais Ya’akov educational movement. She changed the educational landscape for orthodox Jewish women, beginning in the early 20th century.
Sarah was a Polish seamstress who decided to do something to combat the assimilation of her fellow Jewish female peers. Sarah saw that Jewish women were no longer satisfied with the lack of educational opportunities available to them in their own community. The secular world had opened up higher education to all women and Jewish women sought to take advantage of this new inclusive atmosphere.
Sarah decided that the best way to prevent Jewish women from leaving their communities and their faith, was to offer them rigorous academic opportunities within the Jewish world to teach them about both Judaism and secular subjects. With the blessing of the Belzer rebbe in 1917, Sarah began her endeavor of creating a network of religious schools for girls. By the eve of World War II, the network encompassed over two hundred and fifty schools with more than forty thousand pupils, primarily in Eastern Europe. The movement grew quickly and soon became the women’s educational arm of Agudat Israel.
Pictured here is the second graduating class of the Bais Ya’akov in Lodz, Poland, in 1934
In 1933 Schenirer stepped down as the official head of the Bais Ya’akov movement, but remained the symbolic head until her death in 1935 at the age of 52. There are quite a few historical pictures to be found on the internet of Sarah Schenirer and her pupils. I wonder how Sarah would feel, knowing that the current incarnation of her movement advocates erasing women’s images from the public sphere? Furthermore, I wonder how she would feel about a poster, advertising an event held in honor of her yahrtzeit, filled with blurred out images of students originally photographed with pride as evidence of our Jewish continuity?
