Bais Ya'akov Schools This movement of Orthodox Jewish day
schools provides a chance for girls to get an education.
Reprinted from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical
Encyclopedia with permission of the author and the Jewish
Women's Archive. Founded by Sarah Schenirer as a way of
combating assimilation among her contemporaries, Bais Ya'akov is
an Orthodox Jewish educational movement for girls and young
women that began in Cracow, Poland in 1917 and spread rapidly
throughout much of the Ashkenazic Jewish world. Education of
Women Since the commandment of Torah study is not incumbent on
women, there had not been a tradition of formal schooling for
girls within the Jewish community. Instead, they were trained at
home, usually by their mothers and other female relatives, for
the largely domestic roles they would be fulfilling as adult
Jewish women. By the second half of the nineteenth century, as
economic conditions in Eastern Europe deteriorated, partly due
to the rise of yeshivot for men, there arose an eco