Polish police are looking for vandals who destroyed the gravesite, near Krakow’s New Jewish Cemetery, of Sara Schenirer, the founder of the Bais Yaakov movement, who is known as the “mother” of formal Jewish education for Orthodox girls.
A new tombstone was erected in the early 2000s for Schenirer (1883-1935), whose original burial place was destroyed during the Holocaust. Vandals toppled the stone, damaging it, and uprooted concrete pilings that held up a small chain fence surrounding the site.
The site is adjacent to the KL Plaszow Memorial Museum, an open-air exhibition on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp.
“The perpetrators, who used an excavator to demolish the statue and fence around it, are wanted,” said local authorities, urging anyone with information to come forward.
“The community was shocked and outraged by the vandalism,” Jonathan Ornstein, CEO of the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow, told JNS. “Krakow is very proud of Sara Schenirer and her influence on Jewish education. Generations of young Jewish women received proper education due to her vision and groundbreaking work.”
Krakow, said Orenstein, “is a very safe place to be Jewish, and antisemitic incidents are few and far between, and taken very seriously by the police and local authorities.”
He added that the city has said it will rebuild the gravesite “ASAP.”
Schenirer founded dozens of Jewish schools for religious girls in the early 1920s under the banner of Bais Yaakov, Hebrew—in the Ashkenazi pronunciation—of the biblical phrase “the house of Jacob.” In a phrase in which God instructed Moses to tell something to “the house of Jacob” and to the “sons of Israel,” rabbinic commentators took the former to refer to Jewish women and the latter to Jewish men.
A divorcée and seamstress in Krakow, Schenirer created the schools fearing that a lack of Jewish knowledge was driving young, Orthodox Jewish women and teens away from their heritage.
“Any Jewish girl getting a Jewish education today is because of her,” Ann Koffsky, who co-wrote the 2019, young-adult biography Sarah Builds a School, told JNS.
“She started formal Jewish education for girls,” Koffsky said. “She was Chassidic, and she started the schools in the Polish Chassidic community. She went from town to town, and opened schools and trained the teachers.”
Tens of thousands of women have attended or graduated from Bais Yaakov schools, most of which now operate independently while adhering to similar religious guidelines and curricula.
Bais Yaakov “was more than just a school, it was a movement,” Koffsky said. “They had a newsletter. They put on plays. It created a Jewish space for girls where they could come together at a time when there weren’t any other places for them to go.”
