Before Bais Yaakov: How Jewish Girls Learned Torah

Before Sarah Schenirer founded the Bais Yaakov movement in 1918, many people assumed that Jewish girls either remained at home or attended non-Jewish schools. While that was often true, the historical reality was more complex. Long before Bais Yaakov, there were girls who received Jewish education through various forms of study, including attending cheder, learning with a melamed, or studying under female teachers.

Girls' Education Before Bais Yaakov

During the czarist era in the Russian Empire, opening a cheder required official approval from government authorities as well as an annual payment of three rubles. Some Jewish women applied for permission to establish schools for girls, and several of those requests were approved.

Documents preserved in the archives of the National Library reveal the challenges these women faced. In one case, a government official wrote that he had consulted learned Jews and concluded that, according to the Shulchan Aruch, women should not study Torah, and therefore the request should be denied. Another official argued that Russian law referred specifically to a "melamed" and not a female teacher, making such a school unacceptable under existing regulations.

Not every application was rejected. Pesah Gutmacher of Poland received permission to open a cheder for girls, though under strict conditions. She was allowed to teach only the "Jewish language" and not the "Jewish religion." To secure approval, she presented recommendations from rabbis attesting to her qualifications as a teacher of the Jewish language. She was also required to teach Russian and was limited to a maximum of 24 students.

Learning Through the Siddur and Chumash

In practice, studying the "Jewish language" often meant learning through traditional Jewish texts such as the siddur and the Chumash.

The educator and writer Esther Rosenthal Schneiderman describes in her book Naftulei Derachim a girls' cheder in the Polish city of Czestochowa around the year 1900. Hebrew studies there centered on reading the weekly Torah portion and repeatedly practicing the verses. The school had 24 students, a small number compared to the hundreds of girls living in the town.

Girls Studying Alongside the Boys

A more common arrangement involved girls joining lessons with the boys' melamed after the boys had finished their studies for the day.

Because these lessons required additional payment, many families could not afford them. Even paying for the boys' education was often a financial burden. Nevertheless, in many communities, a group of girls would arrive after the boys left.

Bessie Tomashevsky of Kiev recalled that the oyzer, the assistant to the melamed, would walk through the marketplace at the end of the school day and gather young girls for lessons.

The Challenges of Being a Cheder Girl

For many girls, studying in cheder was not always easy.

Some faced teasing and ridicule from boys who viewed them as intruders in what had traditionally been a male educational setting. Oye Broido wrote in her memoirs that she eventually left cheder because she could no longer tolerate the constant teasing.

Later in life, Broido abandoned traditional Judaism and became a prominent Communist revolutionary. Yet one cannot help but wonder whether some of the Jewish education she received as a young girl remained with her throughout her life.

The Road to Bais Yaakov

Ironically, the number of girls attending cheder actually increased in the years leading up to World War I. Public demand for girls' education was growing, and many families wanted their daughters to receive some form of Jewish learning.

A survey conducted in Poland in 1912 found that approximately 8 percent of cheder students were girls. In many cases, older brothers brought their younger sisters along. The girls would sit in a separate room while the melamed and his wife moved back and forth between the classes.

However, many of these schools were no longer fully traditional. Influenced by the Haskalah movement, some introduced educational approaches and ideas that departed from established Jewish values and traditions.

It was this reality that inspired Sarah Schenirer to act.

She recognized that without a structured system of authentic Jewish education for girls, many young Jewish women could be drawn toward foreign ideologies and away from Torah life. Her response was the creation of Bais Yaakov, a revolutionary educational movement dedicated to providing girls with a strong Torah foundation.

Although the idea initially faced opposition in some circles, Sarah Schenirer's vision ultimately transformed Jewish education. Bais Yaakov helped preserve Torah values for countless families and played a pivotal role in building generations of knowledgeable, proud, and committed Jewish daughters.