“We now have a photo of Sarah Schenirer, one she would have fought to keep away from prying eyes. What are the ethics of showing it?”
It was no surprise that the intellectuals my father described, who inhabited the margins on the Agudah, are also the ones most likely to show up in the history of Bais Yaakov.
“…I was pretty surprised to read a report in a 1933 issue of the Bais Yaakov Journal about a girls’ camp commissioning a Torah scroll.”
Among my favorite Bais Yaakov finds in the YIVO archive, and one I discovered almost at the very start of…
The participants of a 1931 tour of Poland undertaken by Agudath Israel and Keren HaTorah. During the interwar period, Bais…
There’s something a little ambivalent and paradoxical about the process of seeing a book you’ve worked on for years finally…
On February 22, 1933, the Yiddish daily Hayntige nayes published a news report with the eye-catching title: “The Agudah Is…
The great scholar and historian Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi once wrote: History is the faith of fallen Jews. But what of…
In 1934, the Agudah secured the right to distribute a share of certificates for immigration to Palestine, from Zionist organizations…
Combing through archives can be a tedious enterprise. Take the Joint Distribution Committee Archive. It’s a beautiful and useful resource,…