Legitimizing the Revolution: Sarah Schenirer and the Rhetoric of Study for Girls

NAOMI SEIDMAN

y the time Sarah Schenirer died in 1935, the movement she had started Bin 1917 to provide Orthodox girls with a rigorous was already well established, with over 200 schools and 38,000 students through- out and beyond.1 These students were enrolled in a wide range of

1 These numbers are taken from Alexander Zusya Friedman, “Foreword,” in Hillel Seidman, Dos yidishe religyeze shul-vesn in di romn fun der poylisher gezetzgebung [Jewish religious schools in the context of Polish legislation] (Warsaw: Horev, 1937), 8. See also Joseph Carlebach, “Keren Hathora-Fahrt zu Jüdischen Kultur-Stätten des Ostens” [The Trip of the Keren Hathora group to Jewish Cultural centers in the East] in Ausgewählte Schriften: Band II [Selected writings: Volume II] (Hildesheim, : G. Olms Verlag, 1982), 1103–83, which docu- ments a trip undertaken in July and August of 1934 by the German Jewish leadership of Keren Hatorah, the educational wing of Agudat Israel, to Eastern Europe, which lists 187 Polish schools, seminaries, and colonies (some still in the process of being formed), and another 23 in Austria (including the teachers’ seminary in ), Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. Such figures, as Yosef Friedenson acknowledges, are hard to establish with any certainty, given the number of schools (especially the afternoon schools in smaller towns) that opened and closed and contradictory figures provided by the movement and those who stud- ied it. Friedenson himself tentatively relies on internal Bais Yaakov figures from 1935 of 225 schools with 27,119 students in Poland; 18 schools with 1,569 students in Czechoslovakia; 18 schools with 1,292 students in Romania; 16 schools with 2,000 students in Lithuania, and 11 schools with 950 students in Austria. See Yosef Friedenson, “Batey hasefer levanot beyt- Yaakov bepolin” [The Beit Yakov girls’ schools in Poland], in Hahinukh vehatarbut ha-ivrit be-eyropa beyn shtey milkhamot ha’olam [Jewish education and culture in Europe between the two World Wars], ed. Tzvi Sharfstein (New York, 1957), 71. Legitimizing the Revolution  357

­programs: full-time elementary and high schools, in which Jewish as well as secular subjects were taught, thus allowing Orthodox girls to fulfill compul- sory education requirements in a Jewish setting; afternoon religious schools; vocational training programs, in which students could study both Jewish sub- jects and dressmaking, secretarial skills, bookkeeping, or even nursing (these vocational schools were later called Ohel Sarah, after Schenirer); and the crown jewels of the system, the teachers’ seminaries in Kraków, Vienna, and Czernovitz. Schenirer also co-founded the youth movement Bnos Agudas Yisroel and was instrumental in establishing the women’s organization of Aguda. Schenirer thus invented what has been described as the single most important development of twentieth-century Orthodoxy: the Bais Yaakov stu- dent, whose knowledge of and passion for Torah reinvigorated Orthodoxy as a whole at a moment of great danger. While the radical spirit of its origins had already diminished by the 1930s, the Bais Yaakov movement saw a rebirth after the Holocaust and continues to flourish throughout the Jewish world. The role of Schenirer as founding figure is central to contemporary Bais Yaakov culture, as it was at its origins. Bais Yaakov girls everywhere know the story of the pious seamstress who saw the need to teach girls Torah, lest they be swept away from Orthodoxy by the lures of modern life. Orthodox hagiog- raphy often presents these beginnings as a creation ex nihilo, in which a simple woman sought to bring the garments of Torah to the “naked” souls of Orthodox girls. Yet Schenirer’s modesty hardly explains the distinctive features of the movement or its astonishingly rapid success. Bais Yaakov succeeded despite a formidable set of obstacles, including a 1903 rabbinical decision against orga- nized religious education for girls; arbitrary legislation by the Polish govern- ment concerning religious schools; and, as Schenirer lamented, the hostility to religion among the Jewish girls of her time. As I will argue, the achievements of Bais Yaakov should be traced not to a rejection of these challenges from the right and left, but rather to their dialectical incorporation; in revolutionizing Orthodoxy in the name of tradition, the movement brought together innova- tive and conservative impulses to create an unprecedented culture. When Schenirer assembled twenty-five girls in her seamstress’s studio in 1917, the Orthodox Jewish world lacked not only an established framework for educating girls, but also a coherent rhetoric that could establish Jewish girls’ as legitimate and valuable, or which placed value on youth, women, or innovation. While Torah study—often read as Talmud—is central to masculine identity, various rabbinic passages explicitly forbid such study for girls. Despite the deep suspicion of innovation among traditionalist Jews, the 358 Part Two Historiographic Questions

community not only accepted but even embraced this new movement. How can we explain this? Agnieszka Oleszak has recently argued that the success of the movement followed from a number of critical developments in Poland: the granting of women’s right to vote in 1918, the Aguda’s involvement in Polish politics and recruitment of Jewish voters, and “the 1919 compulsory educa- tion law.”2 Political factors paved the way for Orthodox support, but without Schenirer’s rhetorical and organizational genius, the movement could hardly have taken off. Bais Yaakov functioned, in the early years, as a missionary move- ment in which graduates of the summer teacher-training course were sent out “into the field” to found new schools. Among Schenirer’s accomplishments was the construction of a discourse that could energize these social entrepreneurs, drawing on their youth (some were as young as fifteen) as a mobilizing factor and finding Jewish resources for female empowerment. The distinctive culture that Schenirer helped create was a confluence of contradictory cultural influences. Schenirer’s writings attest not only to her deep piety but also to her cosmopolitan sensibility. According to her memoir, the vision of religious education for Jewish girls emerged from a fateful encounter Schenirer had in Vienna, where her family had fled during the First World War. Attending the Orthodox synagogue in the Stumpergasse of Rabbi Moshe Flesch, Schenirer was inspired at hearing the rabbi deliver a sermon directed to women congregants, something unknown in her hasidic milieu. As Shenirer relates in her memoir, Bleter fun mayn lebn (Pages from My Life), the rabbi spoke passionately about the figure of Judith, “calling on contemporary women to follow the example of this historical heroine.” Schenirer continues,

I felt immediately that the main thing missing is that our sisters know so little about their past and this alienates them from our people and their traditions. In my mind, at that moment, were born various grandiose plans.3

2 See Agnieszka M. Oleszak “The Beit Ya’akov School in Kraków as an Encounter between East and West,” Polin 23 (2010): 281. For support for Oleszak’s argument that the Agudat Israel adoption of Bais Yaakov was partly motivated by electoral concerns, see the many political advertisements in the Bais Yaakov journal, urging readers to vote for Aguda in local and national elections. 3 Sarah Schenirer, “Bleter fun mayn lebn” [Pages from my life], in Gezamlte shriften (Selected works) (Brooklyn: Bais Yaakov Teachers Seminary in America, 1956), 9. Legitimizing the Revolution  359

This debt to German-Jewish neo-Orthodoxy, following the teachings of , is duly recorded as the very origin for the project of educating girls. A second influence was cosmopolitan Kraków, with its public lectures, youth movements, and political activism. Schenirer often described herself as competing with these cultural options. In fact, Schenirer both resisted and borrowed from the atmosphere that celebrated youth, self-education, and cul- tural engagement. This influence is particularly evident in the Bnos movement, which adapted a host of practices from socialist and Zionist youth movements, including self-governance, hiking and nature activities, summer camps, and even “kibbutzim.” A third influence was Hasidism. Schenirer, who was raised in a Belzer hasidic family and proceeded with her plans only after receiving the blessing of the Belzer rebbe, recreated some of the atmosphere of the hasidic court in the ecstatic singing and dancing that were a part of Bais Yaakov, as well as in the social networks of graduating teachers, who were sent to small towns to spread the Bais Yaakov word. Perhaps the most salient model for the Bais Yaakov movement was the . The Bais Yaakov movement followed, in accelerated fashion, the pat- tern of growth of the yeshiva, from small study groups reliant on local commu- nity support to well-endowed institutions in major cities that attracted students from throughout Europe and even America. It is no surprise that the first Bais Yaakov high school was established in Poniewież (Ponevezh/Panevėžys), site of the world-famous yeshiva, or that the same Aguda conference that adopted Bais Yaakov also founded the elite Yeshivat Hokhmei Lublin. Schenirer herself avoided such comparisons, carefully maintaining the separation between girls’ and boys’ education in terminology and refraining from teaching Talmud. While the Bais Yaakov movement borrowed freely from both traditionaliz- ing and modernizing currents of its environment, its discourse strategically left some of these currents unstated. Schenirer framed her project as a traditionalist response to the lures of the modern city, underplaying the degree to which mod- ernization was both a threat to Jewish culture and a resource for combating this threat. Bais Yaakov was a product of Jewish modernity, beginning with the influ- ence of the neo-Orthodox slogan “Torah im Derekh Eretz,” Torah with secu­ lar/practical education, a program that found initial expression in the Hirsch school system and was adopted by Bais Yaakov. The innovations introduced by Bais Yaakov included formal curriculum, teacher training, improved text- books, the daily schedule of classes and the ringing of bells to mark the change 360 Part Two Historiographic Questions

of classes, the modern appearance of the schools, the emphasis on hygiene, the kindergarten as a unit, the introduction of secular studies and, particularly, of vocational training, physical education as a part of the curriculum, the use of modern facilities such as gymnasia and laboratories, the exposure to world lit- erature and art, and, lastly, the conceptualization of “Judaism” as a subject area. Indeed, after the 1923 adoptions of the movement by the Aguda, Bais Yaakov schools were staffed by educators and administrators brought from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, including most prominently Judith Rosenbaum, who was working on a doctorate in education from the University of Frankfurt when she was recruited to train Bais Yaakov teachers in Kraków; Schenirer also raised funds among Central European Jews. Perhaps ironically, the modern educational methods established by Schenirer may well have served to secure a place for Jewish girls’ education within Orthodoxy because Bais Yaakov also reaffirmed the traditional princi- ple of sexual segregation. Sarah Schenirer could provide a “modern” Orthodox education to early twentieth-century Jewish girls because as long as traditional sexual segregation was maintained, what went on in women’s spheres—as long as it made no inroads into the male sphere—need not overly concern the rabbis. In fact, Bais Yaakov schools produced not female counterparts of their learned brothers, but a distinct culture of gendered learning practices. The denominational distinction between centrist and neo-Orthodoxy, or the geo- graphical distinction between German Jewish and Eastern European Jewry, thus reappears as a gender distinction within Eastern European Orthodoxy, with girls inhabiting a more “modern” and “Central European” world than their male counterparts. In this sense, sexual segregation marked the limits of the Bais Yaakov revolution; in another sense, it was the most powerful tool in the movement, enabling Schenirer to harness the energy of same-sex community in clubs, summer courses, retreats, and camps. Memoirs of the early years attest to the strong connections forged among the Bais Yaakov girls in ceremonies, anthems, special holidays and celebrations, literature, and songs. Schenirer was not only the revered founder of these movements, but also wrote its first textbooks, sewed lace collars for early classes as a kind of badge or uniform, composed plays to be performed at Jewish holidays, and spoke at meetings and graduations. She was often referred to as “the mother” of the movement, but she just as frequently referred to her students as “sisters,” stressing not the maternal connection that located these relationships­ Legitimizing the Revolution  361 within the ­traditional terrain of the Jewish family but rather the spirit that linked her project to the youth movements of her day. In one speech to a Bnos group, Schenirer exhorted the girls: “Youth means: Happiness, cour- age, optimism, and faith in ancient ideals! Pessimism, doubt, sadness is anti- Youth! Youth means: enthusiasm, living and striving! Our youth movement must have life!”4 The radical elements in this discourse also differentiated Bais Yaakov from the German Jewish neo-Orthodox discourse on femininity, which was strongly influenced by the bourgeois culture of the period. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch mobilized a discourse of women’s special religious feelings and their responsibility to raise Jewish children in the 1850s, as part of his own campaign for girls’ education. Such family-oriented ideologies were not entirely absent from early Bais Yaakov literature. But equally promi- nent, especially in Schenirer’s own writings, were motifs that emphasized sis- terly solidarity and the school as a replacement, rather than a building block, for the building of Jewish families. Despite the apparently radical nature of Schenirer’s revolution, she did find support among the Orthodox leadership. Such rabbinical opinions could rely on the distinction, by now canonical in the literature of Bais Yaakov, between the study of “written Torah,” which is permissible for girls and women, and the study of “oral Torah” (primarily the Talmud), which is forbidden to them. It is striking, then, that although such arguments were in principle available, the best-known responsa took an entirely different approach. Rabbi Yisroel Hacohen, the Chofetz Chayim, issued a responsum on Beis Yaakov first in 1918 and then in 1933:

To the esteemed champions and lovers of Torah, the God-fearers [haredim] who are in the city of Fristik, may God bless them and protect them.5 When I heard that God-fearing [haredim] people had volunteered to establish Bais Yaakov schools in the cities to teach Torah and piety, moral virtues and secular/practical studies [derekh eretz] and Torah to Jewish girls, I pronounced their enterprise praiseworthy and prayed that God would bring their efforts to fruition. Theirs is a great and necessary endeavor in these times, as the tide of heresy and all manners of miscreants are lurking and hunting for Jewish souls. Anyone who is concerned about

4 Schenirer, Gezamelte shriftn, 43–44. 5 Fristik is a small town in Galicia, known in Polish as Frysztak. 362 Part Two Historiographic Questions

piety should consider it a to enroll his daughter in such a school. Those who have fears and doubts because of the prohibition against teaching their daughters Torah should not concern themselves with that in these times, and this is not the place to explain this at length, for our own times are not like those that have past, when there was a strong tra- dition of mothers and fathers to go in the path of Torah and religion, and to read the Tse’ena re’ena [Bible translation for women] every Sabbath. Due to our many transgressions this is no longer the case. Therefore every effort should be made to establish as many schools of this type as possible and to rescue what can still be rescued.6

The Chofetz Chayim’s letter is testimony to the principles by which Orthodox authorities overcame their doubts about the value or permissibility of teaching girls Torah. From this perspective, educating Jewish girls, despite being an innovation, is justified because of hora’at sha’ah, the needs of the moment; in these times, when long-established practices no longer served as a bulwark against the temptations of modernity, religious schools for girls become an unfortunate necessity. Schenirer only rarely described her accomplishments as a regretfully necessary response to contemporary conditions. Schenirer’s largest and most attentive audience was comprised of girls and women, who required not an apologetic on the legitimacy of their enterprise but rather a rousing call to arms. Thus, at the first International Congress of Orthodox Women, Schenirer began by speaking of modernity as a moment of awakening:

The Orthodox woman has awakened from her long, lethargic sleep and begun to organize. . . . Not long after we created the Bnos organization in Poland, the powerful voice of the religious Jewish woman rings out on the world stage. The intellectual Jewish woman is no longer isolated. In every corner of the world she is closely bound to her sisters. I know well that many religious Jews will view this with suspicion. We hold sacred the ideal of women’s modesty. “She is in the tent” [hineh

6 For the text of this letter, dated 23 Shvat 5693, see Schenirer, Gezamelte shriftn, 1, where it serves a secondary function of approbation of Schenirer’s writings, alongside the more institutional function of legitimating the movement. The name of the town in which families asked him to rule on the permissibility of Bais Yaakov is often omitted in other Bais Yaakov publications, presumably to widen the reach of the Chofetz Chayim’s ruling. Legitimizing the Revolution  363

ba’ohel]. Probably a portion of the Orthodox world views our Congress as, God forbid, a transgression. But these Jews need to understand that this conference is an outgrowth of the dangers Jewish women face from various secularist [freye] directions. Es la’asos la’hashem, It is a time to act for God—from this perspective must our public efforts be understood.7

The tensions of Schenirer’s project appear in unusually close proximity here. Schenirer begins by celebrating the new visibility of Jewish women, after their long sleep and cultural isolation. She then acknowledges that Jewish tradition prefers Jewish women’s modesty and invisibility, coded here in the biblical pas- sage in which Abraham relays to the angels that Sarah is in her tent. Only in addressing these traditionalist doubts does Schenirer refer to the doctrine of “the needs of the hour.” In speaking of girls’ formal Torah study, especially to girls, Schenirer rather crafted a discourse that deemed girls’ Torah study inherently valuable. This is evident even from the name of the movement, Bais Yaakov, which locates textual warrant for the project in Exodus 19, the story of the revelation on Sinai that in Judith Plaskow’s groundbreaking feminist manifesto provides painful evidence for women’s exclusion from this revelation.8 Exodus 19:3, which reads “Ko tomar levet ya’akov vetaged levenay yisrael” (Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob and declare to the children of Israel, as quoted from the JPS Tanakh) has long been taken to refer to a kind of double revelation— first to the women (as “the house of Jacob”) and then to the men (as “the chil- dren of Israel”). Bais Yaakov not only found in this midrashic reading evidence for God’s giving the Torah, through Moses, first to women, but it also read its own history—also midrashically—into the verse. A trope in the literature is the discovery of the first Bais Yaakov class of twenty-five students embedded in the first word of the verse—ko, which in gematriya adds up to twenty-five! This intertextual play extends as well to the ritual realm: among the distinc- tive holidays of the movement, and the one with no historical precedent, is the celebration of Sivan 3 (three days before the Sinai event, and thus the date of God’s message to Moses to teach Torah to women), which became for a time

7 Schenirer, “Arum undzer velt-kongres,” Gezamelte shriftn, 38. The verse in Psalm 119:126 (It is a time to act for the Lord, for they have violated Your teaching) is midrashically and boldly understood as allowing for the violation of the Torah when required for the sake of God. It is interesting, in this regard, that Schenirer leaves the second part of the verse unquoted. 8 See Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). 364 Part Two Historiographic Questions

a Bais Yaakov holiday. In such intertextual and ritual performances, the very innovations of the movement become occasions for discovering traditional precedent, just as the Torah is shown to foresee the rise of the movement at the very moment of Sinaitic revelation. Another ubiquitous and particularly rich intertextual locus is the associ- ation between Sarah Schenirer and her biblical forebear, the matriarch Sarah. Such a connection is evident in the naming of the movement’s vocational schools “Ohel Sarah,” a reference to the tent in which the biblical Sarah sits (Genesis 18:9), traditionally a sign of her modesty, and also to Schenirer, whose own occupation as a seamstress was among the courses of study at the school. In this name, the tensions between modesty—with which Schenirer is also often associated, precisely through this proof text—and economic self-suf- ficiency are resolved. Even more regularly, Schenirer is connected with the bib- lical Sarah in her “barrenness,” a description that is regularly qualified with the sentiment that although she “unfortunately had no children of her own,” she nurtured thousands of daughters. This rhetoric, too, conceals a submerged ten- sion, since unlike the biblical Sarah, who was indeed long barren, Schenirer was not barren but rather unmarried during the formative years of the movement. The trope of Schenirer as a modern-day Sarah thus not only grounds her life in biblical precedent, but it also obscures her personal choices and domesticates the radical social and cultural practices of the movement she founded in the traditional Jewish language of reproduction, family, and lineage. The problem of researching Orthodox Jewish women is enormously complicated, and not only for the usual reasons: the neglect of women’s his- tory and the paucity of materials on such topics, on the one hand, and the apologetic or hagiographic nature of Orthodox sources, on the other. Certain topics of great interest have been entirely out of bounds, including almost everything about Schenirer’s personal life: we know she was married twice, but the name of her first husband and the reasons for the divorce have remained outside the historical record; whether she was compelled to remarry late in life or chose to remarry remains unclear. More generally, the Bais Yaakov story transcends national borders; Central European neo-Orthodoxy­ was crucial for Schenirer and for Bais Yaakov, and the board of Bais Yaakov included, for example, both Bertha Pappenheim (the German-Jewish Orthodox fem- inist) and Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt (the mother of FDR). Finally, many neglected records of the movement are probably available in Polish archives and remain to be studied. Legitimizing the Revolution  365

One way to conceptualize these challenges is to recognize the degree to which scholarship on Bais Yaakov has commenced in several different spheres: feminist and Yiddishist activists and academics in the United States were among the first to view Schenirer’s work as pioneering. Serious research is now taking place among Bais Yaakov teachers and former students throughout the world, some of whom are committed to recapturing some of the energies of the movement in its prime as well as memorializing its founder. And with the work of Polish scholars such as Oleszak, Joanna Lysek, and others, we are finally beginning to put the Bais Yaakov movement in its interwar Polish context.9 Much remains to be done in all these areas, and collaboration among scholars with different areas of expertise will be critical in the decades to come. But the work will be worth it: that all these research agendas should direct their atten- tion to one woman and the movement she founded is the strongest testimony of the importance and complexity of Schenirer and Bais Yaakov.

9 See, for instance, Joanna Lysek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yaakov Magazine in the context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” in Sprach- und Kulturkontakte in Europas Mitte (Vol. 2: Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective), ed. Andrzej Kątny, Izabela Olszewska, and Aleksandra Twardowska (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013), 127–54.