Dr. Grunfeld was born Judith Rosenbaum on December 18, 1902, in Budapest, Hungary. When she was two years old, her family moved to Frankfurt, Germany. The Orthodox community there was deeply rooted in the hashkafa of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, known as Torah im Derech Eretz. Confronting the growing crisis of assimilation in nineteenth-century Germany, Rav Hirsch believed that a profound understanding of Torah must guide every aspect of Jewish life. To that end, he founded the Hirsch Realschule, a private Jewish school where both boys and girls received instruction in Torah alongside secular subjects—something virtually unheard of at the time. Dr. Grunfeld received her education there, acquiring a pedagogical foundation that would later prove invaluable to the Bais Yaakov movement.

Sarah Schenirer (or Frau Schenirer, as she was known), by contrast, grew up under very different circumstances. She attended a Polish state school in Kraków through the eighth grade. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, compulsory education laws became increasingly common across both Western and Eastern Europe. In Poland, where private Jewish schools for girls were largely unavailable, many families had little choice but to send their daughters to state schools—institutions whose explicit aim was to assimilate minority groups, including Jews, into the Christian majority culture of their country.

Across Europe, compulsory state education played a fundamental role in the assimilation of European Jewry. Understanding these state-sponsored campaigns to assimilate Jews is essential to understanding what Eastern European rabbanim and mechanchim were up against.

Contrary to popular belief, assimilation did not occur within the context of a newly tolerant society, nor was it simply the natural consequence of Jews embracing newfound freedoms in increasingly liberal states. Rather, Jewish assimilation took place in an environment of intense social pressure and political coercion. Although the spread of liberalism in Europe is often portrayed by historians as ushering in an era of unprecedented tolerance, many influential liberal and socialist thinkers portrayed Judaism as not merely antithetical to societal progress but as one of its greatest obstacles. Even Christianity's struggle to reform during the Enlightenment was frequently attributed to the enduring influence of Judaism.