Why Is New York Condoning Illiteracy?
'Last Friday, as observant Jews hurried with last-minute preparations for Passover, one Orthodox Jew was in Albany, holding up the New York State budget. He was insisting that this roughly $168 billion package include a special provision that would allow religious schools to meet the state’s educational requirements by using their long hours of religious instruction.
In recent years, education activists, among them former Hasidic yeshiva graduates, have pushed aggressively to bring the yeshivas into compliance with the state’s education laws. Simcha Felder, the state senator from Brooklyn who represents the heavily ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park and Midwood, was on a mission to get legal permission for the state to turn a blind eye to the near-absence of secular instruction in many yeshivas. The upshot? Tens of thousands of children would continue to graduate without the most basic skills.
I know about the cost. I was one of those kids.
I was raised in New York’s Hasidic community and educated in its schools. At my yeshiva elementary school, I received robust instruction in Talmudic discourse and Jewish religious law, but not a word about history, geography, science, literature, art or most other subjects required by New York State law. I received rudimentary instruction in English and arithmetic — an afterthought after a long day of religious studies — but by high school, secular studies were dispensed with altogether.
The language of instruction was, for the most part, Yiddish. English, our teachers would remind us, was profane. . .
One heavily Hasidic district of Brooklyn, South Williamsburg, has, over the last decade, shown dramatic increases in using public income support such as cash assistance, Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid. New York’s Hasidic community is also experiencing explosive growth — surveys show that the Jewish population of the five boroughs has increased for the first time in half a century, entirely because of the high birthrate among the ultra-Orthodox, which only increases the burden on taxpayers.
Knowing all of this, it takes a special kind of audacity on Mr. Felder’s part to successfully strong-arm the state’s highest legislative body to legally deprive his own constituents’ children of an education and a future. Some might call this chutzpah. In Borough Park, it would be more properly called a Chillul Hashem: a desecration of God’s name.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/opinion/yeshivas-literacy-new-york.html?
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