The Jewish Encyclopedia
of Western Pennsylvania
A project of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center
The Ladies Auxiliary of the Rambam School was created around July 1942 to support the newly formed Rambam School, which later became known as the Maimonides Institute.
An early objective of the auxiliary was the development of the Beth Yakov School for Girls. A seamstress named Sarah Schenirer had started Bais Yaakov in Krakow, Poland in 1917 as the first formalized system of Jewish education for girls. By the end of the 1930s, the Beis Yaakov network in Poland had 250 schools with more than 40,000 pupils, as well as branches in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, New York, and Palestine, according to the Jewish Women’s Archive. The American system expanded in the early 1940s with new schools in Baltimore in 1942, Detroit in 1943, and subsequently in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, and Toronto.
The Beth Yakov School for Girls in Pittsburgh opened student registration in August 1942 for local girls ages six to 16, but the effort appears to have been discontinued within a few weeks. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Rambam School subsequently developed social programming and worked to support the overall aims of the Maimonides Institute.