A seamstress in Cracow, she became keenly aware of the spiritual poverty of the growing generations of girls, so she created a school, and clothed the naked souls of generations to come, by Joseph Friedenson (with additions by Chaim Shapiro).
(This article originally appeared in the Jewish Observer and is also available in book form in the ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications Judaiscope Series. It is reprinted here with permission.
She did not lecture as insistently regarding devotion to her fellow’s needs, but her personal conduct was more eloquent than any lecture. Rav Binyomin Zusman tells:
It was late one evening. Sora Schenirer came into my house, apologizing a thousand times. It was urgent, she said. She knows a young, married man who needs help badly, and here it was – two weeks before Pesach! Giving him charity openly would insult him terribly. She therefore asked me, since I daven next to him in shul, to slip fifty zlotys into his coat pocket. Fifty zlotys was a lot of money, but I had to fulfill her wish. I did exactly as she said, and I then watched the young man put on his coat after davening, place his hands into his pocket – and I watched his eyes light up to the heavens.
No wonder she was called “the female version of the Chofetz Chaim”.
When she took ill and was admitted to the hospital for an operation, she wrote: For the first time in twenty-three years I did not daven be’tzibbur, and did not spend Shabbos with my girls.
She was only fifty-two when she passed away on the 26th of Adar, 5695 (1935), but she enjoyed the great satisfaction of seeing the widespread success of her revolution Leshem Shomayim (for the sake of Heaven). She was not blessed with children of her own. And yet she was a mother. In fact, one could rightly say that no mother in our generation had as many children as she did.
When she departed this life in 1935, hundreds of Jewish girls walked behind her aron, toward the Cracow cemetery, and wept with heartrending cries, as one does for one’s own departed mother. And when news of her petira became known throughout the cities and towns of Jewish Poland, thousands of Jewish girls tore kria and sat shiva as if for a mother. The very same year, hundreds of young Jewish mothers named their new-born daughters Sora, after a woman, who – two decades earlier – was still an unknown Jewish seamstress, but who had since become Rebbetzin Sora Schenirer, the legendary mother of a new Torah-true generation of Jewish women in pre-war Eastern Europe.
By: Zygmunt Put, Ami Magazine
