Although many know of the contribution to the education of Jewish girls by Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov network that began in Cracow in the 1920s, the private schools for Jewish girls that developed in Russian lands from 1831 to 1881 are far less familiar, This gap in Jewish history is rectified with Eliyana Adler’s recent book. Using archival sources, Adler gives us information on more than one hundred schools that trained thousands of Jewish girls both in secular and Judaic subjects, beginning with the first school in the country for Jewish girls. Opened in Vilna in 1831, that school offered classes in European languages, Russian, Yiddish, and the Jewish religion for girls as young as eight in two-year courses of study. Fascinating details are given of funding sources, as the author concludes that the chief obstacle to the success of the schools was financial.
Looking at the way the schools developed over time, Adler adroitly explores how the schools responded to changes taking place in the Jewish community and wider society, and how they influenced their environment, paving the way for the modern schools that followed them. She raises interesting questions of how girls’ education differed from boys’; whether, as has been argued, the relative “marginality” of Jewish women meant that Jewish girls’ schools had more room to innovate than did boys’; and whether these schools were used by Jewish parents mainly as a gateway to further Russian schooling. The striking cover of this book shows the front of the 20th anniversary brochure for a school for Jewish girls in Vilna, 1912.