On the Beit Midrash at Stern College for Women

At the moment there is a woman at Stern College who is volunteering her time and working to reorganize the Eisenberg Beit Midrash. It seems strange that there wasn’t already someone to manage the collection as is the case in the Glueck Beit Midrash on the Wilf Campus.

I don't know for certain why this is the case, but perhaps some context on the development of the Beit Midrash at Stern College will assist in providing perspective into what our next steps should be to improve the situation.

The Wilf Campus, which is the main campus has always had a Beit Midrash. The reason for this is quite simple, this part of the university grew out of a small Yeshiva on the Lower East Side. During the school's first 10 years, the Beit Midrash was its only real facility, and a Beit Midrash was included in all the buildings that it would inhabit in the following years.

In 1928, when the Yeshiva moved uptown to the corner of 187th and Amsterdam, its new building as contained a rather small Beit Midrash on the first floor. This was probably because the College intended to expand across the street and to build a much grander Beit Midrash, leaving the smaller one for the High School. These expansion plans fell through, and it was only until the mid-1940s when the school would be able to expand its physical facilities. The Beit Midrash room within the main building was expanded to include the synagogue room next door. (I haven't been able to determine the exact date for this.) This expanded room, known as the Fischel Beit Midrash, named for the philanthropist Harry Fischel, served as the main Beit Midrash for the school until 2008.

The year 2008 witnessed the completion of the YU's newest academic building, the Glueck Center for Jewish studies. It is a 6-story building with a basement. The first two stories are occupied by a Beit Midrash, with classrooms and offices filling the upper four stories.

This is all good and well for the Men of Yeshiva University, whose campus was built and expanded around the Yeshiva that forms the core of the University (if we disregard the fact that it is legally independent of the University.)

Stern College for Women developed from a very different type of institution. The Beit Midrash or Yeshiva was and remains largely restricted to men in Jewish society. Though there are a few historical examples of women attending Batei Midrash, there were generally excluded from such activities. The movement for higher education for Jewish women developed very differently from the parallel movement for men. While the men's schools developed around the nucleus of a Yeshiva, women's schools developed out of Hebrew school teachers' training programs. The need for women to work in elementary Jewish education was felt by Jews across the religious and political spectrum.

The religious Zionist wing of the RIETS community started a school called the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls, or Beit Midrash la'Morot in Hebrew, in 1928¹. Pinchos Churgin from the Teachers Institute of RIETS was involved in its creation and a graduate of RIETS, Rabbi Joseph Lookstein served as principal for much of the school's life.²

For its first decade, the school met in Rabbi Lookstein's synagogue, Kehilath Jeshurun³ on the upper east side. In 1941, the school acquired a more permanent home in the lower east side at 311 East Broadway⁴. The Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls shared a committee that administered Hebrew school teaching certificates, for which Pinchos Churgin was the chairman. Another significant scholar employed by both schools was Dr. Sidney "Simcha" Honig.

Not only was the faculty between the Teachers Institute of RIETS and the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls share, but the students at both schools seem to have shared a social life. The students of the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls posted an advertisement in the Nov 16, 1944 issue of The Commentator, inviting the Yeshiva College students to their "Annual Chanukah Affair" assuring their peers at Yeshiva College that "A Good Time Will Be Had By All."⁵

Though it had the word Beit Midrash in its Hebrew name, the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls did not have a traditional Beit Midrash. Its instruction was given in classrooms with set curriculums in a more rigid and structured manner. This method of instruction did not encourage the kind of independent study common in men’s education that could develop their ability to research and parse rabbinic texts on their own.

In 1953, Max Stern, the President of the board of the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls, merged his school into Yeshiva University. Once part of Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls was renamed to the Teachers Institute for Women, making its parody to the Teachers Institute for Men official. These two schools functioned somewhat differently from each other, the Teachers Institute for Men was only really attended by full time Yeshiva College students, while the Teachers Institute for Women offered night classes for Jewish women attending secular colleges in the city.

It seems reasonable to assume that the faculty from the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls formed the core faculty of the Judaic Studies department at Stern College for Women. I was not able to find faculty lists for either the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls or Stern College for Women that was close to the time of the merger. However, you do find Dr. Shlomo Wind working for the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls in 1944⁶, and he also appears in the 1958 yearbooks for Stern College for Women as one of the Jewish Studies faculty⁷. Shuli Berger, Yeshiva University Library’s Curator of Special Collections and Hebraica-Judaica, in a 2018 blog confirms Dr. Shlomo Wind’s continuity of work within school before and after it became part of Yeshiva University⁸.

It was until 1977 when the need for a Beit Midrash for independent study arose. However, the mid-town campus had a Beit-Midrash for close to a decade before this point. This Beit Midrash developed out of the dormitory.

It was only in 1965 that Yeshiva University acquired a permanent dormitory for Stern College for Women. Before then, the school had been leasing space in several different residential buildings in the area for out-of-town students. Initially, the out-of-town “dormitory” was on the upper west side, in the heart of a Jewish community with plenty of synagogues to attend. When YU moved the dormitory to mid-town to be closer to its classroom building, there wasn’t much of a Jewish community for the students to participate in.

The women of Stern quickly recognized this problem and advocated for the creation of a synagogue space in the new classroom building that YU was planning to build at 245 Lexington Avenue⁹. Despite the students’ request, the university administration never included such a room in the plans for the building¹⁰.

Taking the initiative themselves, the Torah Activities Committee (at the time a division of the Stern College for Women Student Council) arranged to convert room 2E on the second floor of the dormitory to be a Beit Midrash for independent prayer and study¹¹. The exact location of this Beit Midrash moved between different rooms on the second floor over the years, but it remains there to this day.

In the mid-1970s students and faculty at Stern college began to reform the Jewish studies program to provide more advanced studies. A significant part of these reforms was creating an environment for women to study with a Chavruta to practice their independent study skills and partake in a more traditional method of Torah study, historically reserved for men. The first iteration of this was fully organized by students in 1973 and was called Beit Midrash le-Banot¹². Lacking a real Beit Midrash space, the students who participated used the library¹³.

In 1976, the administration of Stern College began to formulate an advanced Jewish studies curriculum. The purpose was to provide women who had already learned the more fundamental knowledge the opportunity to advance their independent study skills in a Beit Midrash environment with independent study time and Yeshiva style lectures. The program launched in Fall 1977 with Rav Soloveitchik’s widely publicized shiur to the inaugural class of this program. Rabbi Saul Berman, one of Stern’s faculty who was deeply involved with the development of this program, recalls that the Beit Midrash space that the program initially used was located on the first floor of 253 Lexington Avenue¹⁴.

The location of the Beit Midrash in the library did not last very long. The librarians and students were frustrated by not being able to use the periodical reading room during instructional hours. By Spring 1978, the Beit Midrash was relocated¹⁵.

It seems likely that the Beit Midrash was relocated to room 619 in 245 Lexington Avenue¹⁶. The Beit Midrash would remain there until Fall 2007 when the new 7th floor Beit Midrash was opened¹⁷.

The evidence from the Observer and other published sources indicates that the roots of the 7th floor Beit Midrash on the Beren Campus lie within the Beit Midrash program that was inaugurated in 1977. Before then, the administration had no need for a Beit Midrash space, with the Brookdale Beit Midrash being created by Student Council.

This doesn’t really answer any questions about the nature of the collection within the Beit Midrash. Much of it is labeled as if it belongs to TAC, the Torah Activities Council, and it clearly lacks any permanent position for someone to curate and organize the collection.

In the 1980s, TAC seems to have been able to hire student employees to take care of the collection in the Brookdale Beit Midrash¹⁸. Perhaps this model can be copied for the current Beit Midrash to ensure that its collection is cared for and that the people who invest their time in organizing it can be properly compensated for their public service.

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1. ^ “Haynt Konferentz Vegen ‘Beis Midrash la-Moros’,” Der Morgen Zhurnal (New York, NY), Oct. 6, 1938. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/tjm/1938/10/06/01/article/27
2. ^ Jeffery Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pg. 196.
3. ^ “Beis Midrash la-Moros Ofen Far Naye Talmidos,” Der Tog (New York, NY), Sept. 20, 1935. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/dertog/1935/09/20/01/article/32
4. ^ “Registratzia In Dem ‘Beis Midrash la-Moros’ Vet Zikh Onfangen Akhten Sept.,” Forverts (New York, NY), Sept. 5, 1941. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/frw/1941/09/05/01/article/76
5. ^ [Advertisement], “Beth Hamedrash Lamoroth,” The Commentator (New York, NY), Nov. 16, 1944. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5154
6. ^ [Advertisement], “Dringender Ruf Tsu Yidishe Eltern,” Der Tog (New York, NY), Jan. 28, 1944. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/dertog/1944/01/28/01/article/64.1
7. ^ Masorah 1958, (New York: Stern College for Women, 1958), pg. 13. https://archive.org/details/masora1958stern
8. ^ Shulamith Z. Berger, “The 60th Anniversary of the Pioneers of Stern College for Women: The Class of 1958,” YU News (blog), June 12, 2018. https://www.yu.edu/library/2018/06/12/the-60th-anniversary-of-the-pioneers-of-stern-college-for-women-the-class-of-1958
9. ^ [Editorial], “We Propose…” Observer, Jan. 7, 1965. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5049
10. ^ Sue Amin, “Vogel Addresses Alumni Gathering,” Observer, March 1, 1966. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5060
11. ^ [Announcement], “The Small Room 2E in the dorm . . .,” Observer, Dec. 8, 1970. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5997
12. ^ Raina Urbaitis, “Beit Midrash L’Bnot: Intensive Learning L’Shma,” Observer, Sept. 24, 1973. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6032
13. ^ It is not clear which library they were using, the old wing located on the first floor of 253 Lexington or the newer wing on the second floor of 245 Lexington. I suspect it was probably in 253 Lexington, since the official Beit Midrash program that would come towards the end of the decade used the old library in 253 Lexington.
14. ^ Saul Berman, “Forty Years Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash,” Lehrhaus, Oct. 9, 2017. https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/forty-years-later-the-rav%e2%80%99s-opening-shiur-at-the-stern-college-for-women-beit-midrash/
15. ^ Barbara Michael, “Bookends,” Observer, Jan. 19, 1978. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6108
16. ^ Rachel Katsman, “Where Freedom Ends,” Observer, Jan 13, 1982. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6167
17. ^ Yael Wolynetz, “Donors Back New Beit Midrash,” Observer, September 2007. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/8494
18. ^ Lisa Korman, “Beit Midrash to Open Soon,” Observer, Sept. 25, 1981. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6163