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Beth Rivkah Ladies College or Beth Rivkah Lubavitch is a single-gender girls' K-12 Orthodox Jewish day-school on Balaclava Road, East St Kilda in Melbourne, Australia run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement's Yeshivah Centre. The school runs from kinder through to Year 12. By including a comprehensive secular curriculum it is geared in its approach to accommodating children from a non-religious background whose parents would otherwise not agree to enrol their children there. It also serves the purpose of providing an Orthodox Jewish day-school to Orthodox parents who also value a secular education. Indeed, most of its students come from non-Chabad families. 
[edit] Early historyThe school was founded in 1956 by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (with the assistance of Moshe Zalman Feiglin, Yehoshua Shneur Zalman Serebryanski, and others) and is officially under his auspices. In mid-1956 Rabbi Schneerson sent a letter “To Chabad activists in Melbourne,” urging:
Two days later, on 20 Av 5716 [1956],[2] Moshe Zalman Feiglin and his son, Dovid, attended a Farbrengen, a Chassidic gathering, in the court of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe addressed them, saying:
Afterwards the Rebbe wrote to Ya’akov Eliezer Herzog:
The Rebbe made clear what the philosophy of the school was to be. In a letter to Mendel New he wrote of “the vital necessity not only to expand the Yeshivas Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch in Melbourne, but also to found, open up, and expand a girls’ school, Beth Rivkah, according to the philosophy of Chabad education.”[3] The Rebbe regarded himself as a direct partner in this enterprise:
The Rebbe allayed the concerns of those who thought the financial burden of maintaining the school too great:
Mrs. Susan Herz had founded the Herz kindergarten and primary school in 1950. When Rabbi Schneerson called for a girls' school, Zalman Zerebryanski and Moshe Feiglin approached Mrs. Herz, and offered to join forces, expanding her school and dubbing it Beth Rivkah, with Mrs. Herz as its headmistress. She accepted the offer, and remained headmistress until she immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1971. [edit] Current administration and policiesThe school, as a branch of the Yeshiva Centre umbrella, is under the administration of Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, and Mr. Shmuel Gurevitch is the principal of the high school. Although the students at the school are mostly Ashkenazi Jews, with a large element of Hasidim and other Haredim, Mr. Gurevitch introduced that when Hebrew is spoken it should follow the Modern Hebrew pronunciation. He claimed that this would make the school more attractive to as yet non-observant or minimally-observant Jews, whom he argued would identify more with that form of pronunciation. He claimed that he told this to Rabbi Schneerson, who consented to this.[1] The school is part of the larger network of facilities of the Yeshivah Centre, which include a youth movement, Jewish studies classes, day camps, and many other initiatives that benefit Melbourne's wider Jewish community. The school is known for its academic excellence. [edit] See also[edit] External links[edit] References
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