She was the founder of the Sofia Gurevitsh Gimnazye, an academy (secondary school) in Vilnius that promoted the use of Yiddish as a respected language for all purposes, including education.
[1] Born in Minsk, her father was a lumber merchant, wealthy enough to send her to a school for aristocratic women in St Petersburg, Russia[2] where she studied pedagogy and natural sciences.
Along with Gurevitsh, Dveyre Kupershteyn (also known as Deborah Cooperstein; 1854–1939) also established a girls' school that originally taught in Russian before making what was then a bold switch in 1920 to teach entirely in Yiddish.
[3] In contrast, Gurevitsh's academy began as a high school for Jewish girls at a time when this was a novelty.
[4] Gurevitsh's academy produced many students who survived World War II and who worked as academicians, artists, librarians, authors, and educators in Israel, the United States, and Lithuania itself.