As the sister of eminent brothers, Leah disproves the old canard that the only educated women in her time were the daughters of learned rabbis who had no sons.
Leah's early life was spent in Bolechów, in Polish Galicia (now Bolekhiv, Ukraine), where her father was the rabbi.
Although very few Eastern European Jewish women before the nineteenth century have left writings, Leah was the author of the Tkhinne of the Matriarchs, an eight-page, trilingual prayer for the Sabbath before the New Moon.
This text, which has historical importance as one of the few extant works written by an eighteenth-century Eastern European Jewish woman, testifies that its author was far more learned than the norm.
Leah Horowitz was passionately concerned with the religious place and role of Jewish women and she was keenly aware of her own anomalous status as a learned woman.
She addressed these issues explicitly in the Hebrew introduction to her tkhinne, and by implication in the Aramaic piyyut and the Yiddish paraphrase.
Elaborating on what was already a focus of women's piety, the blessing of the new moon in synagogues, she provides a framework that she believed could bring redemption.
In the Yiddish portion of her text (accessible to her female readers), Leah laments the bitterness of the exile and names the New Moon as a time of favor.
Rachel, a common symbol for the Shekhinah, then entreats the Holy Blessed One (Tiferet), with tears, to redeem the Israelites from their exile.