WHILE KRAKÓW is the birthplace of the Bais Yaakov movement, it was actually conceived, as it were, in Vienna, where Sarah Schenirer had fled with a flood of refugees after the outbreak of the First World War brought the Russian army into Galicia. The idea of founding a school for Orthodox girls came to her, she relates in her memoir, as she was listening to a particularly inspiring sermon by Rabbi Moses David Flesch on the sabbath of Hanukah, in late 1914, in his synagogue in Vienna:

Riveted to my seat, I listened with great fascination to the fiery, spirited words of the rabbi.

In his sermon, the rabbi depicted the greatness and sublimity of the historical figure of Judith, and through her, he eloquently and passionately called upon Jewish women and daughters to act according to the model of this one-time Jewish heroine… .

Even as I was caught up in the spiritual description of the character of Judith, it occurred to me: ah, if only all those women and girls in Kraków were here now to learn who we are and where we come from.

‘At that moment’, Sarah Schenirer continues, ‘was born a variety of schemes, great grandiose aims.’

The Viennese origins of Bais Yaakov are no mere happenstance. The canonical story of the founding of the movement insists that the inspiration did not and could not have come to her in Kraków, where Orthodox rabbis did not address their female congregants from the pulpit and—more to the point—where Jewish girls’ education was treated with utter neglect. Thus although she secured a blessing for her project from the influential Belzer Rebbe, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach, after she returned to Kraków, she took the initial steps of this journey entirely on her own. Pearl Benisch describes how Sarah Schenirer's efforts were propelled by the ‘distressing spectacle’ of ‘organized youth who were following all those powerfully influential “isms”’.