At the turn of the 20th century, just like today, the expectations for a young woman born into a Hasidic family were rigid: marry young, have many children, and take care of your home. Higher education was not on the table. But Anna Kluger refused to accept that destiny.
Born on June 24, 1890, in Podgórze, Anna (or Chaya, as her family called her) was the daughter of Wolf Kluger, a millionaire steam mill owner, and Simcha Halberstam, a direct descendant of the founder of the Sandz Hasidic dynasty. Despite her family's immense wealth and elite status, Anna was not interested in luxury, but instead had a fierce passion for learning. While Hasidic girls today attend religious schools like Beis Yaakov, those schools didn't exist then. Anna had a taste of secular knowledge at a non-Jewish primary school and didn't want to stop. Instead of getting married young, she desperately wanted to pass her matriculation exams and attend university.
To her family, this ambition was an existential threat. What followed was a harrowing campaign of domestic abuse. Her parents destroyed and burned her school books, physically punished her for reading, and even brought a lawyer to the Jagiellonian University library to demand the director ban her from borrowing books. When this all failed, they tried marriage. They betrothed her at fifteen to a teenage Hassid named Zacharias Arak.
In August 1909, Anna and her younger sister Leonore escaped from their family home, carrying valuables worth 20,000 crowns to fund their survival. They hid in a convent abroad to evade their family's search parties.
Instead of converting to Catholicism to sever ties, the sisters doubled down on their civil rights. They hired Dr. Siegmund Marek, a prominent Social Democrat lawyer, and sued their father in civil court. They petitioned to be released from their father's legal custody, demanding the right to study, the permission to live independently, and a legal mandate forcing their millionaire father to pay for their living expenses.
When a local Kraków court initially ruled against them, the sisters appealed to the Viennese Supreme Court in a highly publicized, dramatic legal battle. What follows is Anna’s own voice. Written in June 1910 as a personal statement for the Supreme Court, this document lays bare her fight for intellectual autonomy amidst abuse and resistance from her family.
Anna Kluger's Personal Statement in Her Supreme Court Appeal
