“Please, I beg girls, don’t go into the teaching field for the perks”
Ever since I first read about Sarah Schenirer, I have been fascinated by her and her legacy. This is ironic, since as a girl, I was far from the ideal Bais Yaakov student.
This is the sentence in the article that sparked my desire to write this letter, “…students usually forget most of what they learn… but they never forget how they felt in the classrooms or school halls.”
The memories of my early school years are saturated with pain and grief. However, it may be this very element that drives me to thank those special few who held a torch helping me navigate through the darkness of failure and shame.
After a 45-year separation, I merited to reconnect with the brightest light of my sad early school years. The first class Rebbetzin Chaya Mannes Milevsky taught was mine, and Hashem blessed me to have Miss Mannes for second and third grade. During the summer between those years, my father passed away after a long and draining illness, leaving my mother (a young Holocaust survivor) to raise four children, the youngest of whom was two years old.
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