THE EXPERIMENT that was Bais Yaakov was still expanding at a rapid rate and had hardly had a chance to come into its own when it fell victim to the destruction of European Jewry. Despite the disbanding of Bais Yaakov schools with the outbreak of the Second World War, numerous memoirs and histories of the movement attest to its continued clandestine activity during the war years. Stephen Howard Garrin writes that ‘a major factor in the successful operation of the underground religious education network was the work of the Beis Yaakov graduates in Poland’. Ella Shmuelevitz, author of the 1937 article on family purity discussed in Chapter 4, continued to teach and lead Bais Yaakov girls in the Kovno ghetto; Faiga Beigel, a 20-year-old activist and teacher, organized prayer services, study sessions, the recitation of psalms, and Torah lectures for Bais Yaakov girls in the Vilna ghetto in what was called a ‘Women's House of Study’; and Yehudah Leib Orlean, who fled Kraków after a severe beating, continued to lead the movement in the desperate conditions of the Warsaw ghetto, corresponding with teachers and teaching students for as long as he could. In 1941, there were six Bais Yaakov schools still operating in some form in Warsaw, three of them under the aegis of Orlean while the other three were led by Eliezer Gershon Friedenson and Rivka Alter-Rappaport. Other Bais Yaakov or Bnos groups existed in the ghettos of Kraków, Łodź, Będzin, Tarnow, and even in the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The networks forged in the interwar movement aided in the rapid re-emergence of Bais Yaakov schools and Bnos groups in the immediate aftermath of the war, for example in the displaced persons camps of Eschwege, Feldafing, Föhrenwald, Frankfurt, Landsberg, and Zeilsheim. Bergen-Belsen had two Bais Yaakov schools and even a rudimentary teachers’ seminary.