‘In a Place Where There Are No Men’

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Kraków Orthodoxy at the beginning of the twentieth century that constitute the background of the emergence of the Bais Yaakov movement. While Kraków is the birthplace of the Bais Yaakov movement, it was actually conceived, as it were, in Vienna, where Sarah Schenirer had fled with a flood of refugees after the outbreak of the First World War brought the Russian army into Galicia. The canonical story of the founding of the movement insists that the inspiration did not and could not have come to her in Kraków, where Orthodox rabbis did not address their female congregants from the pulpit and where Jewish girls' education was treated with utter neglect. Sarah Schenirer's founding of a girls' school system was thus a pioneering venture into unexplored territory, in which the initiative of a single woman solved a problem that no one else around her recognized, cared about, or could resolve. There is one detail in her memoir, however, that complicates this picture. Extrapolating from her brother's words, it was not the case that no one in Kraków had so far considered using religious education to combat the defection of Jewish girls. Rather, this strategy, however obvious and even laudable it might be, was impracticable given the political realities of Orthodox life.