Sarah Schenirer and the Rhetoric of Torah Study for Girls

Legitimizing the Revolution: Sarah Schenirer and the Rhetoric of Torah 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 Jewish education was already well established, with over 200 schools and 38,000 students throughout Poland 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, New York: 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 Bais Yaakov schools, seminaries, and colonies (some still in the process of being formed), and another 23 in Austria (including the teachers’ seminary in Vienna), 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 compulsory education requirements in a Jewish setting; afternoon religious schools; vocational training programs, in which students could study both Jewish subjects 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’ Torah study 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 education 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 movement 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 Samson Raphael Hirsch, 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 cultural 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 yeshiva. The Bais Yaakov movement followed, in accelerated fashion, the pat- tern of growth of the yeshiva, from small study groups reliant on local community 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

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