Puah Rakovsky

Puah Rakovsky was born in 1865 in Białystok

Rakovsky was born on July 3, 1865, in Białystok to a prosperous Jewish family. She was the oldest child of Rachel and Menahem Mendel Rakovsky. Her father's side included a long line of rabbis.

As a child she studied in a heder and later at a private Jewish school in Białystok. Her father refused to send her to a gymnasium, so she studied Russian, German and Hebrew at home with private tutors. At 16 she was married in an arranged match and had a son and a daughter.

After her marriage failed, she earned a teaching license and in 1889 opened a Hebrew school for girls in Łomża. In 1891 she moved to Warsaw to direct a girls' school. In 1893 she opened a school for girls there that taught Hebrew and Jewish studies alongside general subjects.

In Warsaw she was active in the Zionist community and focused on the advancement of women. In 1920 she founded the Jewish Women's Association, which offered secular and vocational education to Jewish women.

Rakovsky moved to the Land of Israel in 1935. Her memoirs appeared in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in them she called herself a radical Jewish woman. She died in Haifa on May 13, 1955.