Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 16 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
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On the new board in the classroom:
“Bais Yaakov lechu v’nelchah b’or Hashem.”
“It’s so nice!” Katy beamed, while the girls enthusiastically sang the song that Babbe Sara Liba had taught Naomi.
“My grandmother used to live in Lodz, Poland, before the Nazis came to power,” Naomi said in a whisper when the song came to an end. “She taught there at one of the dozens of Bais Yaakov schools established by Sarah Schenirer, and to this day she hasn’t forgotten how wonderful it was. When I was a little girl, she sang this song to me every night, before I went to sleep. When she was a teenager, she participated in Bais Yaakov training for aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. But in the end she couldn’t go, and she stayed in Poland.”
“And that’s how she was saved, actually,” eleven-year-old Renia Stauber pointed out, and Naomi smiled at her. A few of the students stood on the line that Naomi had drawn in white chalk down the middle of the room, to make it easier to see what the older girls were doing at their desks. On the other side of the room, Mila was playing with the younger children, ignoring what was going on in the small classroom. It was the second day that Naomi had dared clearly announce the opening of the “Bais Yaakov” class, and Mila didn’t say anything anymore, even though more than a third of the girls in the class belonged to Leo Sherer’s group.
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