Sarah Schenirer

Sarah Schenirer (1883-1935) was the founder of the Bais Yaakov movement, the first systematic Torah-education network for Orthodox girls. A Krakow seamstress with no formal rabbinic training, she watched her brothers and male peers receive years of Torah education while their sisters were sent to Polish public schools — and concluded that the secularization of Eastern European Orthodox women was an existential threat. With the backing of the Belzer and Gerrer Rebbes and the Chofetz Chaim's halachic ruling permitting (and requiring) women's Torah education in the modern era, she opened her first school in Krakow in 1917 with 25 students.

By her death in 1935 the Bais Yaakov network spanned over 250 schools educating 38,000 girls across Poland and the Diaspora. The Holocaust devastated the original network but the model survived; every Bais Yaakov, Beis Yaakov, Beth Jacob, and Haredi girls' high school in the world today traces its institutional DNA to her Krakow seamstress shop. She is buried in the Krakow Jewish cemetery.