486 A History of Judaism
talmudic learning. On the political issues which arose on the agenda
from the start (originally with regard particularly to affairs in Poland,
where Agudat Israel formed a political party in 1919), however, great
influence was wielded by the democratically elected Great Assembly as
well as by the Council it appointed. The participation of universally
admired rabbinic sages was crucial to the success of the Agudah. But it
also ensured a constant tension, since many of the east European rabbis
saw no value whatever in the western culture which the German rabbis
had embraced. The Polish and Lithuanian rabbis were little troubled by
Reform, which had hardly made any impact on their communities, and
the alliance they sought was primarily against the secular Zionists. Fol-
lowing a proposal by Hayyim Soloveitchik, the communal rabbi of
Brest- Litovsk (known in Yiddish as Brisk) and widely recognized as the
leading talmudist of his day, unity in religious affairs was contrived by
agreeing that the different groups should be allowed to maintain their
ways of life unaltered. In fact a considerable amount of change proved
possible under the auspices of the Agudah, particularly in the status of
women. Within the orthodox world, the remarkable Sarah Schenirer,
self- taught and from a hasidic family unconcerned with secular educa-
tion, opened a school in her home in Cracow in 1917 to teach religion
to girls so that they would not be required to attend Catholic schools.
By 1939 around 200 of her Beth Jacob schools were operating all over
eastern Europe under the auspices of Agudat Israel; since 1945, many
Beth Jacob schools have opened in the United States and Israel.^10
Just as the Reform movement came under pressure for its anti-
Zionism in the 1930s and 1940s, so too did the Agudah. Isaac Breuer,
the son of Salomon, was a leading spokesman of the Agudah from the
start, but he became less anti- Zionist after the Balfour Declaration in
1917, and in 1936, when he migrated from Nazi Germany to Palestine,
he founded a splinter movement, Poalei Agudat Yisrael, to work for an
independent Jewish state ‘uniting all the people of Israel under the rule
of the Torah, in all aspects of political, economic and spiritual life of the
People of Israel in the Land of Israel’. By contrast, Yitzhak, the youngest
son of Hayyim Soloveitchik, who succeeded his father as rabbi of Brisk,
maintained his father’s traditions both of talmudic study and of oppos-
ition to secular studies and Zionism. Despite being forced to flee Europe
in 1939 and, as a result, resident in Jerusalem for the last twenty years
of his life, he aligned himself firmly as a spokesman of the haredi com-
munity in Israel, declining to take any public position but speaking out
in defence of Judaism whenever he believed there to be a threat.^11