Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Dear Reader,
For decades it has been an open secret that many chasidic yeshivas for boys in New York do not offer adequate - and legally mandated - secular studies. But a push for reform is gaining traction. In a special report, made possible by a grant from The Jewish Week Investigative Fund and in collaboration with WNYC, Jewish Week deputy managing editor Amy Sara Clark and special correspondent Hella Winston explore how the culture of the chasidic community and the cozy relationship between local politicians and key chasidic leaders has led to this lack of secular education - and how a former chasid and a non-Jewish city councilman are making inroads for change. To hear the WNYC segments, go to www.wnyc.org
New York
Don’t Know Much About History
Inside the uphill battle to improve secular education in chasidic yeshivas.
Hella Winston and Amy Sara Clark
Photo Galleria:
NYC's chasidic boys likely log more classroom time than anyone else. But they graduate barely able to read English. JW Photo
But with a secular education that ended when he was 13, he quickly found out how wrong they were. Unable to read English, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of math, Moshe discovered that the only work he could get was in a Jewish bakery. The hours were long and the pay low. And as a married man, he knew kids were on the way. He had to make more money.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people shoud be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
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It's got nothing to do with the timing because the High Holy Day season is neither "early" nor "late" as we approach 5776. Rather, it's about an increasingly fractious Jewish community that at year's end appears more eager to make charges against each other than make amends with each other, as our rabbis instruct.
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The Jew crush
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Since the 2016 elections have taken off, the race has been filled with surprises, theater and certainly confusion, thanks to a certain bombastic, toupee denier. One thing that can be said about this run: many are feeling the Bern. Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her pantsuits and is also filling America’s hearts with a bern-ing love.
Here are 7 reasons I have a Jew Crush on Bernie Sanders:
1. The bar-mitzvahed, former Burlington mayor is a 718 original. Sanders was born to Jewish, immigrant parents in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where his signature crazed mane would probably feel right at home these days.
2. He goes by a nickname. Sanders may be the longest-serving independent in U.S. Congressional history, but he isn’t above a good ol’ nickity nack. Way to keep it real Bernie.
3. Sanders famously and staunchly opposed the war in Iraq. Er, yeah, good call on that one.
4. The man has game. When Sanders was in high school, he won the basketball state championship and was captain of the track team.
5. Guy’s got girl power. The progressive candidate is a proud protector and supporter of women’s rights.
6. He doesn’t just talk the talk, (which he does with a pithy eloquence I might add), he also walks the walk. In 1963, Sanders participated in the March on Washington.
7. He knows how to mix it up. Fiji? That’s not for us sweets. The newly married Sanders couple, took their honeymoon in what was formerly The Soviet Union
New York
Don’t Know Much About History
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most “desirable to hire.”
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Don't Know Much About History
Amy Sara Clark and Hella Winston
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most "desirable to hire."
Read MoreNew York
Don’t Know Much About History
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most “desirable to hire.”
The Shape Of Worship To Come
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Princeton, N.J. - They are the downsizers. And perhaps the uplifters.
At a time when "starchitects" are building soaring residences in the sky, some rising to 80 or 90 stories, a small group of lower-profile architects is trying to redefine the worship experience for struggling synagogues often burdened by outdated, outsized and inefficient sanctuaries.
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The Shape Of Worship To Come A small group of architects is redefining sacred spaces, and perhaps reinvogorating synagogues in the proces
Rabbi Debra Hachen holds an architect's plan for the new, streamlined look of the sanctuary of Temple Beth-El in Jersey. JW
Princeton, N.J. — They are the downsizers. And perhaps the uplifters.
Syria Debate Tests Israel's Values
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Jerusalem - Israel was caught this week between a fence and an embrace.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate - one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people - about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so. Read More
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Refugees including a disabled boy from Syria attempt to invade Hungarian police near the Sebian border. Getty Images
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In the Beginning
Reform Machzor Enlarges The Tent
1501 Broadway, Suite 505
New York, New York 10036 United States
____________________________
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people shoud be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
Also this week, Staff Writer Steve Lipman reports on a small group of architects who are redefining sacred spaces, seeking to reinvigorate synagogues; Contributing Editor Michele Chabin on how the debate over Syrian refugees is testing Israeli values; Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus on the new Reform Machzor for the High Holy Days; a Q and A with Iran sanctions czar Adam Szubin on why it's now time to life them; the secret to wooing Birthright alums; and a special Rosh HaShanah section highlights cool gifts for the holiday.
The Shape Of Worship To Come A small group of architects is redefining sacred spaces, and perhaps reinvogorating synagogues in the proces
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photo Galleria:
At a time when “starchitects” are building soaring residences in the sky, some rising to 80 or 90 stories, a small group of lower-profile architects is trying to redefine the worship experience for struggling synagogues often burdened by outdated, outsized and inefficient sanctuaries.
Their mandate: intimacy is all.
“We do more with less,” said Joshua Zinder of the firm Landau Zinder based here. “You want to inspire,” Michael Landau said of the firm’s architectural goal. “We can shape the spiritual experience.”
As Jews by the tens of thousands flock to synagogue next week for the Jewish New Year, more will be praying and singing in leaner and greener worship spaces, ones more in line with the demographic and economic realities of today’s Jewish community.
But over the years, for far too many congregants in far too many synagogues around the country, the “spiritual experience” Landau speaks of has been diluted, as members dropped away and often-cavernous sanctuaries fell into disrepair. One such synagogue is the on-the-rebound Jersey City congregation, Temple Beth-El.
At a business networking meeting here a year ago, Zinder got into a conversation with a member of the temple. Zinder learned that it, like many urban Jewish congregations, had experienced a decline in membership since its high point in the 1950s and ’60s, and “was at a turning point.” Beth-El’s 89-year-old building needed extensive repairs, it didn’t have enough money to pay for them and the synagogue officers considered selling the site and moving.
Don’t make a decision yet, Zinder told the temple member; let me come see the building and meet with the officers.
“Maybe we can help.”
The two architects are part of a firm formed just three years ago that specializes in renovating Jewish houses of worship, transforming synagogues from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to the Berkshires to Plano, Texas. A generation apart (Zinder is 47; Landau, 73), the two bring a similar streamlining ethic to their projects, which, like Temple Beth-El, are often small congregations with limited budgets.
One night, a week after the initial conversation, Zinder drove to Jersey City. Sitting in the Temple Beth-El balcony, a sketchpad and #2 pencil in hand, he listened to several synagogue officers and Rabbi Debra Hachen, the congregation’s spiritual leader for four years, describe the situation. Membership was down to some 180 family units, from 600 in its heyday. The sanctuary, whose 900 seats once were filled to capacity, seemed eerily empty to the several dozen worshipers who would come on a typical Shabbat. Thieves in 2011 had stolen the copper tiles from the roof, which was leaking. The shul could not afford the repairs.
Based on some preliminary sketches, on a study of the congregation’s history and its anticipated growth in the next decade, and on subsequent meetings with other Temple Beth-El members, Zinder and Landau submitted a design for the Byzantine Revival building’s renovation, repair and redesign. The plans include downsizing seating in the 11,000-square-foot sanctuary to seat a maximum of 450, replacing the fixed pews with moveable seating, building classroom space in what is now the balcony, adding a new elevator and bathrooms, renovating the social hall and other rooms in the basement, installing an air conditioning system and handicap-accessible ramps, taking advantage of natural lighting from now-blocked windows, and moving the sanctuary’s bima from the western side to the traditional, eastern side.
“He understood our vision very well — people need a place to call [their spiritual] home,” Rabbi Hachen said.
Temple Beth-El (betheljc.org), which put the architects’ plan to a successful membership vote, has begun a $3 million fundraising “Kadimah!” campaign for the project.
The Jersey City synagogue is typical of many urban congregations that have experienced decreases in membership and increases in operating expenses in recent decades. And Landau Zinder is part of a growing trend — architectural firms that are called upon to renovate extant synagogue buildings, rather than build new ones.
“As construction costs continue to rise, many congregations are faced with the realization that they need to be very realistic about what they can afford to build,” said Julian Preisler, a historian and author of a series of books about synagogues in the U.S. “Many congregations are closing, merging or selling large expensive buildings and building smaller, more functional synagogues. ‘Green’ technology seems to be growing. Synagogue design is now much more simple, clean and devoid of a lot of architectural embellishment. This firm seems to work well with the realities of synagogue design today.”
Like Temple Beth El in Jersey City, the 720-family Midway Jewish Center on Long Island underwent an extensive renovation that ended earlier this year. New additions included a reconfiguration of the sanctuary to make it more intimate, the addition of a handicap-accessible ramp, and the establishment of a separate space in the foyer for yahrtzeit plaques.
“It was not an expensive renovation. It was less than $1 million,” said Rabbi Raphael Rank, the congregation’s spiritual leader. The building, on the border of Syosset and Plainview, is in “a very fine location, so moving elsewhere was unnecessary, not to mention the greater cost such a move would incur,” Rabbi Rank said.
Two architectural firms played a role in the building’s renovation — Ascalon Studios in West Berlin, N.J.; and Levin/Brown in Owings Mills, Md.
“The [renovated] sanctuary gives us an entirely new feel — greater intimacy and less hierarchy,” Rabbi Rank said. “Architecture reflects the spiritual values of a congregation. Too often in Jewish history, synagogue architecture was victim to the stricture of a repressive ecclesiastical authority. The American Jewish community is now in a position to tastefully and artistically express its deepest feelings about Judaism free of censure.”
Mark Levin of Levin/Brown, which has worked on some 150 synagogue projects in the last three decades, said that his firm’s renovation of old synagogue buildings has “marginally increased,” and that his designs reflect a congregation’s “programmatic changes in worship” and a synagogue’s “emphasis on building relationships.”
In Jersey City, Rabbi Hachen said Zinder and Landau put into physical terms the spiritual needs of her congregation, showing that it makes more economic sense to upgrade the extant building than to build a new one a few miles away.
Having to move, Zinder said, is the situation that many aging synagogues have faced in the last half-century, since many Jews in this country moved to the suburbs from the inner city.
“Often the spiritual value of the built temple space has deteriorated over time,” Landau said. “We seek to restore that value.”
Other local synagogues whose redesign the firm is coordinating include Temple Tikvah, in New Hyde Park, L.I.; and B’nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The handful of congregations with which Landau Zinder is now working — and the several dozen congrgations of all denominations for which the partners have drawn up similar renovation plans — show that renovations on old buildings can trump construction of new ones, Zinder said. “A synagogue that wants to make significant changes can achieve this.”
Landau Zinder is among a handful of architectural firms in the United States whose full-time or part-time expertise is synagogues. All, Zinder and Landau said, deal with contemporary preferences and economic realities and evolving aesthetic preferences. Young Jews, whether in the city or suburb, favor less-conspicuous synagogue buildings than their parents and grandparents built. Small is the new big. They “don’t want to be seen from the street,” Zinder said. Young Jews, in either location, want synagogues that can serve as multi-purpose educational-and-social centers. And the synagogues of young Jews usually have limited financial resources.
“Young people don’t want their parents’ synagogue,” said Zinder, who was named Architect of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Architects last year.
“We have to design something that is economical,” Landau said. His goal: “Something that has a spiritual value, but has the ability to accommodate secular activities.”
The partners, who share a longstanding interest in designing synagogues, met at the Princeton Jewish Center, where they served on the congregation’s building committee. “I’ve seen the [building] process from the other side,” Zinder said.
Zinder and Landau “clearly use a postmodern approach with regard to design,” Preisler told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Many synagogue architects use elements from Eastern European wooden synagogues as well as incorporate elements evoking a modern Israeli style — large stone blocks, rows of upper windows. This firm seems to like a lot of natural light and worship spaces that can be multi-purpose.”
The Landau Zinder firm typically designs every facet of its synagogue projects, including a sanctuary’s bima table and Ner Tamid light. Said Landau: “It’s my contribution to Judaism.”
Jersey City, whose Jewish population had decreased from an estimated 13,000 60 years ago to 5,200 in 1980 but bounced back to a current 6,000, was once home to “dozens of shuls,” Rabbi Hachen said. “It was a very Jewish place.”
Now, most of the city’s synagogues have closed; only four remain.
In recent years, several young Jewish families have settled in Jersey City, attracted by its low housing costs, good public school system and convenient commute to jobs in New York City, the rabbi said. An increase in the synagogue’s membership to 250 family units in the next few years is realistic, she said. “It’s a growing urban area.”
The new members of Temple Beth-El include large numbers of attorneys, teachers and people in the real estate industry; there are few very wealthy people among them, Rabbi Hachen said.
So the congregation has instituted a “phased-in” five-year fundraising campaign, and established a non-profit corporation, The Friends of Temple Beth-El Jersey City.
Renovations will probably start sometime in 2016.
An architectural firm makes more money from constructing a new building than renovating an old one, Zinder said. But the spiritual needs of a site like Temple Beth-El — “It has a sense of history” — outweigh the bottom line, he said.
Zinder said he and Landau have no regrets about advising a congregation to renovate rather than rebuild. “For us it’s the right thing.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Their mandate: intimacy is all.
“We do more with less,” said Joshua Zinder of the firm Landau Zinder based here. “You want to inspire,” Michael Landau said of the firm’s architectural goal. “We can shape the spiritual experience.”
As Jews by the tens of thousands flock to synagogue next week for the Jewish New Year, more will be praying and singing in leaner and greener worship spaces, ones more in line with the demographic and economic realities of today’s Jewish community.
But over the years, for far too many congregants in far too many synagogues around the country, the “spiritual experience” Landau speaks of has been diluted, as members dropped away and often-cavernous sanctuaries fell into disrepair. One such synagogue is the on-the-rebound Jersey City congregation, Temple Beth-El.
At a business networking meeting here a year ago, Zinder got into a conversation with a member of the temple. Zinder learned that it, like many urban Jewish congregations, had experienced a decline in membership since its high point in the 1950s and ’60s, and “was at a turning point.” Beth-El’s 89-year-old building needed extensive repairs, it didn’t have enough money to pay for them and the synagogue officers considered selling the site and moving.
Don’t make a decision yet, Zinder told the temple member; let me come see the building and meet with the officers.
“Maybe we can help.”
The two architects are part of a firm formed just three years ago that specializes in renovating Jewish houses of worship, transforming synagogues from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to the Berkshires to Plano, Texas. A generation apart (Zinder is 47; Landau, 73), the two bring a similar streamlining ethic to their projects, which, like Temple Beth-El, are often small congregations with limited budgets.
One night, a week after the initial conversation, Zinder drove to Jersey City. Sitting in the Temple Beth-El balcony, a sketchpad and #2 pencil in hand, he listened to several synagogue officers and Rabbi Debra Hachen, the congregation’s spiritual leader for four years, describe the situation. Membership was down to some 180 family units, from 600 in its heyday. The sanctuary, whose 900 seats once were filled to capacity, seemed eerily empty to the several dozen worshipers who would come on a typical Shabbat. Thieves in 2011 had stolen the copper tiles from the roof, which was leaking. The shul could not afford the repairs.
Based on some preliminary sketches, on a study of the congregation’s history and its anticipated growth in the next decade, and on subsequent meetings with other Temple Beth-El members, Zinder and Landau submitted a design for the Byzantine Revival building’s renovation, repair and redesign. The plans include downsizing seating in the 11,000-square-foot sanctuary to seat a maximum of 450, replacing the fixed pews with moveable seating, building classroom space in what is now the balcony, adding a new elevator and bathrooms, renovating the social hall and other rooms in the basement, installing an air conditioning system and handicap-accessible ramps, taking advantage of natural lighting from now-blocked windows, and moving the sanctuary’s bima from the western side to the traditional, eastern side.
“He understood our vision very well — people need a place to call [their spiritual] home,” Rabbi Hachen said.
Temple Beth-El (betheljc.org), which put the architects’ plan to a successful membership vote, has begun a $3 million fundraising “Kadimah!” campaign for the project.
The Jersey City synagogue is typical of many urban congregations that have experienced decreases in membership and increases in operating expenses in recent decades. And Landau Zinder is part of a growing trend — architectural firms that are called upon to renovate extant synagogue buildings, rather than build new ones.
“As construction costs continue to rise, many congregations are faced with the realization that they need to be very realistic about what they can afford to build,” said Julian Preisler, a historian and author of a series of books about synagogues in the U.S. “Many congregations are closing, merging or selling large expensive buildings and building smaller, more functional synagogues. ‘Green’ technology seems to be growing. Synagogue design is now much more simple, clean and devoid of a lot of architectural embellishment. This firm seems to work well with the realities of synagogue design today.”
Like Temple Beth El in Jersey City, the 720-family Midway Jewish Center on Long Island underwent an extensive renovation that ended earlier this year. New additions included a reconfiguration of the sanctuary to make it more intimate, the addition of a handicap-accessible ramp, and the establishment of a separate space in the foyer for yahrtzeit plaques.
“It was not an expensive renovation. It was less than $1 million,” said Rabbi Raphael Rank, the congregation’s spiritual leader. The building, on the border of Syosset and Plainview, is in “a very fine location, so moving elsewhere was unnecessary, not to mention the greater cost such a move would incur,” Rabbi Rank said.
Two architectural firms played a role in the building’s renovation — Ascalon Studios in West Berlin, N.J.; and Levin/Brown in Owings Mills, Md.
“The [renovated] sanctuary gives us an entirely new feel — greater intimacy and less hierarchy,” Rabbi Rank said. “Architecture reflects the spiritual values of a congregation. Too often in Jewish history, synagogue architecture was victim to the stricture of a repressive ecclesiastical authority. The American Jewish community is now in a position to tastefully and artistically express its deepest feelings about Judaism free of censure.”
Mark Levin of Levin/Brown, which has worked on some 150 synagogue projects in the last three decades, said that his firm’s renovation of old synagogue buildings has “marginally increased,” and that his designs reflect a congregation’s “programmatic changes in worship” and a synagogue’s “emphasis on building relationships.”
In Jersey City, Rabbi Hachen said Zinder and Landau put into physical terms the spiritual needs of her congregation, showing that it makes more economic sense to upgrade the extant building than to build a new one a few miles away.
Having to move, Zinder said, is the situation that many aging synagogues have faced in the last half-century, since many Jews in this country moved to the suburbs from the inner city.
“Often the spiritual value of the built temple space has deteriorated over time,” Landau said. “We seek to restore that value.”
Other local synagogues whose redesign the firm is coordinating include Temple Tikvah, in New Hyde Park, L.I.; and B’nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The handful of congregations with which Landau Zinder is now working — and the several dozen congrgations of all denominations for which the partners have drawn up similar renovation plans — show that renovations on old buildings can trump construction of new ones, Zinder said. “A synagogue that wants to make significant changes can achieve this.”
Landau Zinder is among a handful of architectural firms in the United States whose full-time or part-time expertise is synagogues. All, Zinder and Landau said, deal with contemporary preferences and economic realities and evolving aesthetic preferences. Young Jews, whether in the city or suburb, favor less-conspicuous synagogue buildings than their parents and grandparents built. Small is the new big. They “don’t want to be seen from the street,” Zinder said. Young Jews, in either location, want synagogues that can serve as multi-purpose educational-and-social centers. And the synagogues of young Jews usually have limited financial resources.
“Young people don’t want their parents’ synagogue,” said Zinder, who was named Architect of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Architects last year.
“We have to design something that is economical,” Landau said. His goal: “Something that has a spiritual value, but has the ability to accommodate secular activities.”
The partners, who share a longstanding interest in designing synagogues, met at the Princeton Jewish Center, where they served on the congregation’s building committee. “I’ve seen the [building] process from the other side,” Zinder said.
Zinder and Landau “clearly use a postmodern approach with regard to design,” Preisler told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Many synagogue architects use elements from Eastern European wooden synagogues as well as incorporate elements evoking a modern Israeli style — large stone blocks, rows of upper windows. This firm seems to like a lot of natural light and worship spaces that can be multi-purpose.”
The Landau Zinder firm typically designs every facet of its synagogue projects, including a sanctuary’s bima table and Ner Tamid light. Said Landau: “It’s my contribution to Judaism.”
Jersey City, whose Jewish population had decreased from an estimated 13,000 60 years ago to 5,200 in 1980 but bounced back to a current 6,000, was once home to “dozens of shuls,” Rabbi Hachen said. “It was a very Jewish place.”
Now, most of the city’s synagogues have closed; only four remain.
In recent years, several young Jewish families have settled in Jersey City, attracted by its low housing costs, good public school system and convenient commute to jobs in New York City, the rabbi said. An increase in the synagogue’s membership to 250 family units in the next few years is realistic, she said. “It’s a growing urban area.”
The new members of Temple Beth-El include large numbers of attorneys, teachers and people in the real estate industry; there are few very wealthy people among them, Rabbi Hachen said.
So the congregation has instituted a “phased-in” five-year fundraising campaign, and established a non-profit corporation, The Friends of Temple Beth-El Jersey City.
Renovations will probably start sometime in 2016.
An architectural firm makes more money from constructing a new building than renovating an old one, Zinder said. But the spiritual needs of a site like Temple Beth-El — “It has a sense of history” — outweigh the bottom line, he said.
Zinder said he and Landau have no regrets about advising a congregation to renovate rather than rebuild. “For us it’s the right thing.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Jerusalem - Israel was caught this week between a fence and an embrace.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate - one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people - about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so. Read More
Israel NewsSyria Debate Tests Israel’s Values
Is a fence the answer? An embrace?
Contributing Editor
Photo Galleria:
Jerusalem — Israel was caught this week between a fence and an embrace.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate — one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people — about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so.
In cafés and on Facebook, Israelis are arguing the pros and cons of admitting even a few hundred refugees.
Many cite security concerns, fearing that ISIS will hitch a ride into the Israeli heartland. Others insist that the only Jewish country in the world has an obligation to provide a home to the homeless. Still others say the government can’t even cope with the tens of thousands of African migrants and refugees already in the country, and that welcoming other asylum-seekers would further strain the country’s resources.
That Israel is technically at war with Syria hasn’t stopped the country’s liberals from bashing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Israel is too small a country to accept refugees from Syria, its most openly hostile neighbor.
Israel “is not indifferent to the human tragedy” of refugees, Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday, and noted that Israeli hospitals have treated about 1,000 injured Syrians. But “Israel is a very small state. It has no geographic depth or demographic depth,” the prime minister said, clearly alluding to the demographic threat an influx of Arab Muslim refugees would pose to Israel’s Jewish majority.
To drill the point home, Netanyahu then announced plans to begin construction of a new 18-mile stretch of fence along its border with Jordan, which has absorbed 750,000 Syrian refugees and another 50,000 from Iraq. Israel already has fences on its border with Syria on the Golan Heights, its border with Lebanon, its border with Gaza and much of the West Bank.
Israel’s recently completed 143-mile fence along the Egyptian border has all but stopped the influx of refugees from Africa, but tens of thousands remain in the country.
Within hours of Netanyahu’s remarks opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the prime minister lacked compassion.
“You’ve forgotten what it is to be Jewish,” Herzog wrote on his Facebook page. “The prime minister of the Jewish people doesn’t close his heart nor his borders when people are fleeing for their lives, with babies in their arms, from persecutors.”
While Herzog’s remarks went viral, they didn’t sway public opinion.
In a poll released by Channel 10 on Monday, just 11 percent of those polled want to see Israel welcoming the refugees while 80 percent do not.
In an ironic twist, an editorial in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper — which rooted for Herzog in this year’s elections — accused Herzog of hypocrisy.
“Opposition leader Isaac Herzog — whose Zionist Union faction opted to shut down the Knesset committee that dealt with the treatment of foreign workers and asylum seekers, claiming the issue wasn’t sufficiently important — said Israel should consider taking in Syrian refugees. But before Herzog volunteers to accept new refugees, he ought to explain why he hasn’t lifted a finger in years for the sake of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers already in Israel, who also fled out of fear of the acts of murder and terror taking place in their strife-riven countries.”
Other liberals saved their barbs for Netanyahu and his right-wing government.
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the leftist +972 magazine, told The Jewish Week that Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have taken in four million Syrian refugees, and that Israel has a moral obligation to pitch in.
“I don’t expect Israel to remotely match those figures — but none? Not one family? Not one orphan? This is a disgrace,” he said. “For a Jewish country that accuses the world of having ‘stood silent’ during the Holocaust, not to take in a single Syrian refugee? For a country that boasts of being an ‘island of democracy’ in a cruel region to be the one country on Syria’s borders that’s locked its doors? ‘Disgrace’ is a big understatement.”
Derfner said Israel should absorb “somewhere between 1,000 and a few thousand refugees” who could be housed around Israel in prefab caravans.
“Israel housed over 400,000 former Soviet immigrants who arrived in the early ’90s, so a few thousand Syrians shouldn’t be a problem. Their nationality is irrelevant — taking in [Syrian] Palestinians is no precedent for recognizing the Palestinian right of return, or for anything other than making a humanitarian gesture. But I must say that personally, I feel the worst about keeping out the Kurds, who are such brave, persecuted people, and such long-time allies of Israel.”
In contrast, Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, warned that taking in Syrian refugees, or permitting the Palestinian Authority to do so, could endanger Israel’s security.
“We don’t know what kind of political activity the refugees were involved in and some may be terrorists,” Inbar said. “As for the Palestinians taking in refugees, do we need more terrorists or hostile people in the Palestinian territories?”
Even if the refugees don’t pose a security risk to Israel, Inbar said, absorbing people from a country that “views Israel in terrible terms isn’t wise. It will be easier for them to be absorbed in an Arabic-speaking country with a similar mentality. I don’t see the Gulf states, which have the money, doing anything to accept refugees.”
Sarah Tuttle-Singer has heard all the arguments, for and against, and says she is prepared to house a refugee mom and a couple of kids in her tiny apartment on a moshav.
|“The kids and I barely close out our month above zero in the bank,” the single mother wrote in her popular Times of Israel blog. “We’ve had to borrow. There were two days two years ago where we ate a lot of Ramen, white bread, and chocolate spread.”
Last year, she said, she and her kids “lived in a glorified trailer. Our kitchen was as wide as my hips, and we had one bed for the three of us. But this year we have bedrooms and a porch and enough space for dance parties.
“So, yes, Bibi and all who say there is no room: if you let in a few thousand refugees? This mother and her two children will take in another mother and her two children for as long as they need. A refugee camp is no place for a mother and her children — I know this from having spent three long weeks without a stable place to sleep with my two children. So let them in — just a few thousand — let in the children, let in their mothers. And let families like mine do the right thing.”
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate — one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people — about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so.
In cafés and on Facebook, Israelis are arguing the pros and cons of admitting even a few hundred refugees.
Many cite security concerns, fearing that ISIS will hitch a ride into the Israeli heartland. Others insist that the only Jewish country in the world has an obligation to provide a home to the homeless. Still others say the government can’t even cope with the tens of thousands of African migrants and refugees already in the country, and that welcoming other asylum-seekers would further strain the country’s resources.
That Israel is technically at war with Syria hasn’t stopped the country’s liberals from bashing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Israel is too small a country to accept refugees from Syria, its most openly hostile neighbor.
Israel “is not indifferent to the human tragedy” of refugees, Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday, and noted that Israeli hospitals have treated about 1,000 injured Syrians. But “Israel is a very small state. It has no geographic depth or demographic depth,” the prime minister said, clearly alluding to the demographic threat an influx of Arab Muslim refugees would pose to Israel’s Jewish majority.
To drill the point home, Netanyahu then announced plans to begin construction of a new 18-mile stretch of fence along its border with Jordan, which has absorbed 750,000 Syrian refugees and another 50,000 from Iraq. Israel already has fences on its border with Syria on the Golan Heights, its border with Lebanon, its border with Gaza and much of the West Bank.
Israel’s recently completed 143-mile fence along the Egyptian border has all but stopped the influx of refugees from Africa, but tens of thousands remain in the country.
Within hours of Netanyahu’s remarks opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the prime minister lacked compassion.
“You’ve forgotten what it is to be Jewish,” Herzog wrote on his Facebook page. “The prime minister of the Jewish people doesn’t close his heart nor his borders when people are fleeing for their lives, with babies in their arms, from persecutors.”
While Herzog’s remarks went viral, they didn’t sway public opinion.
In a poll released by Channel 10 on Monday, just 11 percent of those polled want to see Israel welcoming the refugees while 80 percent do not.
In an ironic twist, an editorial in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper — which rooted for Herzog in this year’s elections — accused Herzog of hypocrisy.
“Opposition leader Isaac Herzog — whose Zionist Union faction opted to shut down the Knesset committee that dealt with the treatment of foreign workers and asylum seekers, claiming the issue wasn’t sufficiently important — said Israel should consider taking in Syrian refugees. But before Herzog volunteers to accept new refugees, he ought to explain why he hasn’t lifted a finger in years for the sake of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers already in Israel, who also fled out of fear of the acts of murder and terror taking place in their strife-riven countries.”
Other liberals saved their barbs for Netanyahu and his right-wing government.
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the leftist +972 magazine, told The Jewish Week that Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have taken in four million Syrian refugees, and that Israel has a moral obligation to pitch in.
“I don’t expect Israel to remotely match those figures — but none? Not one family? Not one orphan? This is a disgrace,” he said. “For a Jewish country that accuses the world of having ‘stood silent’ during the Holocaust, not to take in a single Syrian refugee? For a country that boasts of being an ‘island of democracy’ in a cruel region to be the one country on Syria’s borders that’s locked its doors? ‘Disgrace’ is a big understatement.”
Derfner said Israel should absorb “somewhere between 1,000 and a few thousand refugees” who could be housed around Israel in prefab caravans.
“Israel housed over 400,000 former Soviet immigrants who arrived in the early ’90s, so a few thousand Syrians shouldn’t be a problem. Their nationality is irrelevant — taking in [Syrian] Palestinians is no precedent for recognizing the Palestinian right of return, or for anything other than making a humanitarian gesture. But I must say that personally, I feel the worst about keeping out the Kurds, who are such brave, persecuted people, and such long-time allies of Israel.”
In contrast, Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, warned that taking in Syrian refugees, or permitting the Palestinian Authority to do so, could endanger Israel’s security.
“We don’t know what kind of political activity the refugees were involved in and some may be terrorists,” Inbar said. “As for the Palestinians taking in refugees, do we need more terrorists or hostile people in the Palestinian territories?”
Even if the refugees don’t pose a security risk to Israel, Inbar said, absorbing people from a country that “views Israel in terrible terms isn’t wise. It will be easier for them to be absorbed in an Arabic-speaking country with a similar mentality. I don’t see the Gulf states, which have the money, doing anything to accept refugees.”
Sarah Tuttle-Singer has heard all the arguments, for and against, and says she is prepared to house a refugee mom and a couple of kids in her tiny apartment on a moshav.
|“The kids and I barely close out our month above zero in the bank,” the single mother wrote in her popular Times of Israel blog. “We’ve had to borrow. There were two days two years ago where we ate a lot of Ramen, white bread, and chocolate spread.”
Last year, she said, she and her kids “lived in a glorified trailer. Our kitchen was as wide as my hips, and we had one bed for the three of us. But this year we have bedrooms and a porch and enough space for dance parties.
“So, yes, Bibi and all who say there is no room: if you let in a few thousand refugees? This mother and her two children will take in another mother and her two children for as long as they need. A refugee camp is no place for a mother and her children — I know this from having spent three long weeks without a stable place to sleep with my two children. So let them in — just a few thousand — let in the children, let in their mothers. And let families like mine do the right thing.”
Staff Writer
Photo Galleria:
Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda — no, this isn’t a syllabus for a college lit course; it’s a sampling from the new Reform High Holidays prayer book.
Next week, Reform shul-goers will be spared the humdrum of conventional services with a newly revamped machzor, equipped with poetry, feminist and LGBTQ-friendly prayers and 11 woodcut prints inspired by the holiday themes. The edition, published in March and being put to use for the first time next week, is the first new prayer book to be penned by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the umbrella group for North American Reform rabbis, since 1978. Three hundred synagogues have pre-ordered the book.
“It’s definitely an upgrade,” said Rabbi Deborah Hirsch, interim senior rabbi at Temple Shaaray Tefila, a large Reform congregation on the Upper East Side. “It gets personal in a whole new way.”
The new installment, which makes a special effort to include Jews with disabilities and Jews of color, comes as studies point to an alarming drop in synagogue attendance among young Jews. A March 2014 Pew Research Center study found that millennials are increasingly unmoored from religious institutions; it came on the heels of its 2013 “Portrait of American Jews,” which found that 32 percent of young Jews define themselves as having no religion.
Rabbi Hirsch’s congregation was one of the few to pilot the machzor for the past two High Holiday seasons. Results have not disappointed. Attendance has risen, and congregants are increasingly engaged in the services, she said.
“We need a liturgy that gives people permission to be honest about serious questions and doubts,” said Rabbi Hirsch. The new machzor “allows people whose faith is not as grounded as they would hope” to feel welcome and included in the services, she said.
She gave one example of a section before the Mourners’ Kaddish that discusses how to recite the prayer for a parent who was emotionally or physically harmful or for someone who died from violence. “The text doesn’t hide from these painful tensions.”
Still, though Reform rabbis excitedly usher in the new prayer book, hoping to up engagement, not everyone seems sanguine. Jewish World Review, a right-leaning webzine published by Binyamin Jolkovsky, went so far as to promise free High Holiday tickets to those who “feel uncomfortable for ANY reason” in their synagogues. The note, presumably referring to the new Reform prayer book and its inclusiveness, was placed atop a JTA story about it reprinted on the JWR site.
Rabbi Hirsch, in response, said that some are “uncomfortable” with the idea of “embracing Jews who have not traditionally been embraced.”
In an effort to be more inclusive of women and LGBTQ Jews, the machzor intermittently refers to God as a woman and in one passage substitutes the words “bride” and “groom” with the gender-neutral “couple.” In a blessing that calls congregants to the Torah, mention of gender is left out as a gesture to transgender people.
But the true outsiders being embraced for the first time? Canadians, Rabbi Hirsh joked. “He [Jolkovsky] is probably just upset that we included a prayer for Canada.”
Sanctions Czar: It’s Time To Lift Them Now
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Photo Galleria:
Treasury Department official Adam Szubin: Seeking to allay fears in the Jewish community.
Adam Szubin, 42, the top U.S. Treasury Department official to monitor Iran’s sanctions compliance, was in New Jersey this week, traveling with Sen. Corey Booker (D-N.J.) and speaking to Jewish groups. No doubt Booker, who has lost favor among critics of the Iran nuclear deal for coming out in favor of it, hoped Szubin’s expertise — and strong Jewish credentials — would offset some of the heat he’s been taking in the Jewish community. Szubin is the product of an Orthodox home and day school education in Bergen County, N.J., and was a founder in 2002 of the DC Minyan, a traditional congregation with an egalitarian flavor. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he has been with Treasury since 2004, and helped develop and coordinate policies on terrorist financing, money laundering, sanctions programs, rogue regimes, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and intelligence analysis. This spring President Obama chose him as under secretary of terrorism and financial intelligence, informally described as “the sanctions czar.” He spoke to The Jewish Week by phone several times this week, apologetically cutting short a late-night conversation to meet his chavruta (study partner) for their regular Torah study time
Q: Knowing that many in our community are deeply worried about the Iran agreement, what is your approach in addressing Jewish audiences?
A: Midway between informational and persuasive. I’m not lobbying. But I want people who are concerned or alarmed about the agreement to see that there is room for people who are strongly pro-Israel to support it. As someone who has dealt with this on the inside, I want people to understand that this is the best alternative.
You recently went to Israel to meet with top officials there, no doubt to allay their fears about the agreement. What was the outcome?
The meetings were through the initiative of our office, part of longstanding communication and coordination with the Israelis on a wide range of things we do together, including constant collaboration on strategy and on the technical level. One goal is to ensure that the sanctions are enforced vigorously outside the nuclear file, in terms of Iranian support for [Syrian President] Assad, Hezbollah, etc. That collaboration — and tremendous alignment of interests — hasn’t changed throughout the negotiations and even since the announcement of the deal. We discussed the deal, and how it will be implemented. And the fact is, our sanctions regarding Iranian’s bad behavior — human rights violations, suppression of speech, etc. — are in place and are intensifying.
Are you worried that Iran will now give tens of billions of dollars to Hezbollah and other terror groups it supports?
My job is to restrict this money in the first place and to immobilize these funds. I am not indifferent to this situation.
But the United States strongly believes that the release of $50 billion doesn’t change in any qualitative way Iranian support for Hezbollah and other [terror] groups, whom they have supported throughout the years of sanctions. That doesn’t mean that no additional money will be diverted their way, but even if Iran wanted [to give more], it has massive financial obligations and debts on the domestic side. Iran owes half a trillion dollars for salaries and pensions and money taken from their commercial banks. President Rouhani has pledged to fix Iran’s economy, and his political career depends on it.
Should the sanctions have been kept in place until a better deal was reached?
Keep in mind that going back to 2006, sanctions were always seen as a means to an end, the end being a diplomatic agreement to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat. There are those who believe that sanctions should only have been lifted if Iran changed the nature of its theocentric regime wholesale — including its support for terrorism, abuse of human rights, and so on. I care deeply about those areas of Iran’s bad activity, but it is untenable to wait unless you are prepared to wait an incredibly long time. And it’s clear that by taking Iran’s nuclear threat off the table, this deal leaves us far better positioned to address concerns about Iran’s other destabilizing actions.
Skeptics believe that Iran will now use evasion and deceit to continue its nuclear program.
Most of the details of the agreement focus on this area, with overlapping safeguards so that Iran can’t cheat. And if they do, they will be detected and punished. There are multiple opportunities to detect, every step of the way. There is no way to clean or hide uranium enrichment. The consequences for violations of the agreement purposefully are not spelled out because we have to determine how serious the violation and how best to address it. Not spelling out specific consequences for specific actions prevents Iran from studying the consequences in advance and determining if cheating is worth it.
How do we know the U.S. will respond vigorously to violations?
Publishing a penalty doesn’t demonstrate our seriousness. The Treasury Department has been very tough over the past 10 years. Iran takes us seriously when we say we’ll be watching like hawks. [In March, Szubin testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that in the past 15 months, during the negotiations with Iran, Treasury imposed some $450 million in penalties on violations of the Iran sanctions.] We have been clear with the Iranians that we will continue to take action if necessary. Our track record should give people confidence that we mean what we say on both Iran’s nuclear and other outside activities.
Gary@jewishweek.org
New York
A: Midway between informational and persuasive. I’m not lobbying. But I want people who are concerned or alarmed about the agreement to see that there is room for people who are strongly pro-Israel to support it. As someone who has dealt with this on the inside, I want people to understand that this is the best alternative.
You recently went to Israel to meet with top officials there, no doubt to allay their fears about the agreement. What was the outcome?
The meetings were through the initiative of our office, part of longstanding communication and coordination with the Israelis on a wide range of things we do together, including constant collaboration on strategy and on the technical level. One goal is to ensure that the sanctions are enforced vigorously outside the nuclear file, in terms of Iranian support for [Syrian President] Assad, Hezbollah, etc. That collaboration — and tremendous alignment of interests — hasn’t changed throughout the negotiations and even since the announcement of the deal. We discussed the deal, and how it will be implemented. And the fact is, our sanctions regarding Iranian’s bad behavior — human rights violations, suppression of speech, etc. — are in place and are intensifying.
Are you worried that Iran will now give tens of billions of dollars to Hezbollah and other terror groups it supports?
My job is to restrict this money in the first place and to immobilize these funds. I am not indifferent to this situation.
But the United States strongly believes that the release of $50 billion doesn’t change in any qualitative way Iranian support for Hezbollah and other [terror] groups, whom they have supported throughout the years of sanctions. That doesn’t mean that no additional money will be diverted their way, but even if Iran wanted [to give more], it has massive financial obligations and debts on the domestic side. Iran owes half a trillion dollars for salaries and pensions and money taken from their commercial banks. President Rouhani has pledged to fix Iran’s economy, and his political career depends on it.
Should the sanctions have been kept in place until a better deal was reached?
Keep in mind that going back to 2006, sanctions were always seen as a means to an end, the end being a diplomatic agreement to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat. There are those who believe that sanctions should only have been lifted if Iran changed the nature of its theocentric regime wholesale — including its support for terrorism, abuse of human rights, and so on. I care deeply about those areas of Iran’s bad activity, but it is untenable to wait unless you are prepared to wait an incredibly long time. And it’s clear that by taking Iran’s nuclear threat off the table, this deal leaves us far better positioned to address concerns about Iran’s other destabilizing actions.
Skeptics believe that Iran will now use evasion and deceit to continue its nuclear program.
Most of the details of the agreement focus on this area, with overlapping safeguards so that Iran can’t cheat. And if they do, they will be detected and punished. There are multiple opportunities to detect, every step of the way. There is no way to clean or hide uranium enrichment. The consequences for violations of the agreement purposefully are not spelled out because we have to determine how serious the violation and how best to address it. Not spelling out specific consequences for specific actions prevents Iran from studying the consequences in advance and determining if cheating is worth it.
How do we know the U.S. will respond vigorously to violations?
Publishing a penalty doesn’t demonstrate our seriousness. The Treasury Department has been very tough over the past 10 years. Iran takes us seriously when we say we’ll be watching like hawks. [In March, Szubin testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that in the past 15 months, during the negotiations with Iran, Treasury imposed some $450 million in penalties on violations of the Iran sanctions.] We have been clear with the Iranians that we will continue to take action if necessary. Our track record should give people confidence that we mean what we say on both Iran’s nuclear and other outside activities.
Gary@jewishweek.org
New York
The Secret To Wooing Birthright Alum
It’s the Holy Grail for engaging millennials. One woman might have answers.
Staff Writer
Photo Galleria:
Philanthropist Charles Bronfman at event honoring Birthright madrichim, or trip leaders. Courtesy of Alumni Community
What’s the trick to attracting Birthright alumni?
Rebecca Sugar, executive director of the Alumni Community, New York’s largest provider of post-Birthright programming, has spent the last decade researching that question and planning programs based on the results. With three years of focus-group research under her belt, she has some thoughts on what is effective and what isn’t.
“Personal invitations matter,” said Sugar, who has headed the organization since its founding in 2003. “Alumni don’t connect to the abstract idea of Jewish community. They want to see friends they know, and they wanted to be invited by the people they know.”
Her findings are backed up by data. A March 2014 Pew Research Center study found that millennials are increasingly unmoored from institutions. Half of young adults between the ages of 18 and 33 describe themselves as political independents and 29 percent (3 in 10) say they are not affiliated with any religion.
“The assumption that alumni will jump into Jewish communal life when they get back is incorrect,” according to Sugar, who said the alarming disinterest in institutional life among young Jews begs a fresh approach. “Ten days in Israel is highly impactful, but it’s a blip in the broader picture,” she noted.
A recent study by UJA-Federation of New York on voluntary dues in synagogues corroborated the Pew Center’s findings. Survey results found that Jewish young adults are far less interested in affiliating with Jewish institutions than their older cohorts.
Sugar is confident that transforming the mindset of young Jewish adults who previously thought of themselves as “outsiders” depends upon sustained, targeted and personal engagement.
“We’re not asking them to find their way in,” she said. “We’re giving them a personal guide.”
This summer, the Alumni Community, a partner of the Jewish Enrichment Center (JEC) in Lower Manhattan, is piloting the Madrich initiative, an effort to integrate past Birthright trip leaders into personalized alumni programming. Former madrichim, or trip leaders, will be given a stipend to run consistent programming, including a reunion among those who shared a bus on Birthright travels, within weeks of their trips’ return. Events will focus on getting to know individual alumni in order to customize events to their liking. For alumni who do not show an interest in formal events, madrichim have funds for book clubs, Shabbat dinners, and even return trips to Israel. Sugar declined to provide the exact amount of the stipend.
More than 400 madrichim have already signed on to participate.
Gil Adler, a 2005 Birthright alumnus, will be one such madrich. Adler, who became very involved with the Alumni community after his return from Israel, described the “emotional high” he experienced on the trip in Israel, and the challenge of keeping that up after his return.
“When you come home, the excitement and passion is going to dissipate unless you get involved,” said Adler, a 31-year-old financial controller originally from Bergen County, N.J. “The alumni community was right there when I got back, inviting us out for cocktails with half of our bus, or inviting interesting speakers. They allow the high to go on as long as possible.”
For Adler, his connection to Israel remained firm, and during his first summer after college, he returned to Israel to join the army where he served for two years.
Returning to the U.S. after his service, he wanted a way to give back. “Becoming a madrich was the perfect thing,” he said. Since 2009 he has staffed 10 Birthright trips, and upon returning to New York joined the Alumni Community’s efforts to keep students involved.
On Facebook, he remains connected with more than 200 alumni, and he personally keeps in touch with 20 to 30 former participants. The Pew study found that while millennials might not be interested in joining traditional Jewish groups, online networks are new and thriving communities, with 81 percent of millennials on Facebook.
“It’s not the traditional staff, participant relationship,” he said. “They realize I’m one of them. If I reach out and tell them about an event, they’re going to come. The trip organizer can’t do that. Birthright can’t do that. Only someone who is the same age, from the same area and who shared the same experience is going to keep them coming back.”
Founded in 2003 shortly after Taglit-Birthright began sending Jewish young adults to Israel, the Alumni Community, now 12,000 strong, has steadily expanded, even as other efforts to engage the same cohort have struggled. Birthright NEXT, the official alumni outreach branch of the Birthright Israel Foundation, closed up shop in May. NEXT’s CEO, Morlie Levin, retired quietly at the end of December, and its managing director, Liz Fisher, also left the organization.
Smaller and more specialized projects, including One Table, a program based on the success Birthright Next had for several years in helping to sponsor Friday night Shabbat meals for Birthright alumni, and the 100 Point Challenge, an incentive-based program run by the Orthodox outreach organization Aish Hatorah New York, are seeking to fill the vacuum left by Birthright NEXT.
The Alumni community is privately funded by Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt and businessman and philanthropist Aaron Wolfson. Though the organization merged with Birthright Israel NEXT in 2010, then two split shortly after. Sugar attributed the split to a difference in “approach” but did not elaborate. The Birthright Foundation could not be reached for comment.
With Steinhardt and Wolfson dedicated to the project’s growth, the community has grown. Every few years, the Alumni Community produces a wedding book. To date, there have been 150 matches.
Courtney Simmons, another active participant in the Alumni Community, met her fiancé through a trip on Reloaded, subsidized visits that bring Birthright alumni back to Israel. While traveling in the Golan, she met her husband, who was not an official trip participant, at a hotel where the group was staying. The two reconnected back in New York at a Shabbat dinner sponsored by the Alumni Community.
“I did not go in thinking I would meet someone, but it makes sense that I did,” said Simmons, who is currently pursing a masters in educational theater at NYU. She described her initial Birthright trip as important, but sustaining connections upon her return is what mattered more.
“Most participants have zero religious connection. Some leave with community, a sense of pride, and the desire to learn more. But without someone pushing you to continue, that dissipates.”
Sugar’s isn’t the only organization mining personal connections to woo the potential Jewish millennial here. Base Hillel, a relationship-based engagement initiative sponsored through UJA-Federation of New York and Hillel International, launched last month in August in two New York locations. The program will match Jewish millennials with local rabbinic couples in the hopes of growing a larger Jewish social network. Moishe House, one of the fastest-growing outreach initiative for Jews in their 20s, boasts seven New York hubs and increasing numbers.
Though none of the these groups, including the Alumni Community, has access to the official Birthright lists, the holy grail of Jewish millennial engagement, Sugar said that over a decade of face-to-face networking is the most reliable way to get the word out.
“Young Jews go from feeling like outsiders to participants,” she said. “But these alum are not just going to jump into communal life. They need to be asked, by the right people, at the right time, in the right way.”
The Artisanal New Year
Bedouin embroidery, a stoneware honey pot, eco paper garlands for Sukkot: Our annual guide of cool (and socially meaningful
Culture Editor
Photo Galleria:
Claire Marin’s Catskill Honey from upstate New York.
Start off the new year of studying the Torah with a naturalist’s original and insightful observations on the text. From a noted authority on plants and herbs who lives on a small farm in the Adirondacks, “Seeds of Transcendence: Understanding the Hebrew Bible Through Plants” by Jo Ann Gardner (Decalogue Books) is infused with the author’s deep love and knowledge of the land and native flora of Israel. In her research, she spent a lot of time with the late Nogah Hareuveni, founder of Neot Kedumim, Israel’s Biblical Landscape Reserve. Her clear writing brings together the material and spiritual worlds of the text.
$29.95 paperback, $49.95 hardcover. Decalogue Books, (800) 697-0402.
Give a gift of sight. For every pair of sharp-looking Blue Planet reading glasses that you buy, the company will donate a pair to someone in need. Made of recycled materials with bamboo temples, the eyeglasses come in a variety of colors. So far, the company has given away 100,000 pairs of glasses.
$24 per pair of glasses (and a pair will be given away). Magpie, 488 Amsterdam Ave., (646) 998-3002, magpienewyork.com.
Support the improvement of Bedouin women’s lives through beautiful hand-made items with traditional Bedouin embroidery. The Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status, Lakia is the first Bedouin women’s nonprofit organization in southern Israel. Through its website and the sales at its Visitor’s Center, it is generating income for Bedouin women, preserving traditional handcrafts, teaching small business skills and supporting its ongoing work to improve educational opportunities for women and youth — Lakia runs a mobile library as well as local educational programs. Making items like colorful embroidered iPad covers, it is bridging tradition and modernity.
Two representatives of the organization were in New York earlier this summer — their first visit to the U.S. — to present their products and their powerful stories of underfunded schools, domestic violence against women, polygamy and unemployment — always stressing the importance of women’s education. One activist, the daughter of illiterate parents, who speaks several languages (and has two sons studying medicine), spoke of embroidery as empowerment.
Greeting cards from recycled paper with embroidery inserts (and blank insides) are $6; an iPad case is $38. Small items range in price from $5 to $50 (pillows); larger items, like the triangular shawls, range from $65 to $120. (Prices do not include shipping and handling.)
Desert-embroidery.org. For pricing and orders, contact rikma@lakia2.org.
Prepare a seasonal apple pie in this colorful stoneware dish from Yachad Gifts. Or order apple-shaped baskets filled with marzipan, honey and other kosher sweets. The baskets are beautifully assembled, the caring work of individuals with disabilities who receive training to gain diverse employment skills from Yachad/The National Jewish Council for Disabilities, affiliated with the Orthodox Union. All proceeds go toward forwarding the work of Yachad.
Dish $30, baskets, $18 and up. Yachadgifts.com. New store location: 1090 Coney Island Ave., Suite 401, Brooklyn.
“Happy bees make better honey,” says Claire Marin of Catskill Honey, the producers of raw, natural, kosher-certified honey, in Long Eddy, N.Y., in the Western Catskills. For fall, wildflower honey is available in jars and pieces of honeycomb (that go really well over apples). One of the secrets to keeping her bees happy is to harvest gradually.
Jar of honey, $12 online. (Jewish Week readers receive a 20 percent discount on the jars by ordering online with the code EATING WELL.) Honey comb, $29.95 for about 10 ounces. Catskillprovisions.com. Also available at Zabar’s and Dean & DeLuca.
Make and serve the perfect honey cake in a colorful baking dish made in Israel by the pottery group A Half Cup of Sugar. The design features date palms, the words “for soft and fragrant honey cake” in Hebrew and, of course, a bee. Recipes are included.
Baking dish, $38. The Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3333, shop@thejm.org.
Spread sweetness and drizzle honey from a striking stoneware honey pot, embossed with a honeybee. To avoid spills, the dipper is attached to the natural wood lid. Designed in Massachusetts by a studio called Beehive, the pot is hand cast by fair trade artisans in the Andes Mountains in Peru.
Honey pot, $88. The Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3333, shop@thejm.org.
Susan’s House in Jerusalem was founded in 2002 as a memorial to Susan Kaplansky, who worked to help at-risk young people living on the street, with rehabilitation through training in art. With training from professional artists and craftspeople, the teens produce high-quality pieces in art glass, jewelry and ceramics. Visitors are welcome. The Pickman Shop at the Museum of Jewish Heritage carries a splendid Susan’s House colored glass honey dish. Other items are available online from Susan’s House.
Glass honey tray, $35. Pickman Museum Shop, Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place, (646) 437-4243, pickmuseumshop.com. Shop online at Susanshouse.org.il.
Add to the beauty of your sukkah and support the people of Nepal, who are slowly recovering from the devastating earthquake earlier this year, along with more recent aftershocks and landslides caused by the monsoons. These colorful eco paper garlands, handcrafted by fair trade women’s cooperatives in Nepal — whether a string of butterflies, fish, flowers of birds — are six feet long. The garlands and fold-out rosettes, designed with cheerful detail, are crafted of Lotka paper, made from the bark of the daphne plant through an ancient papermaking process.
Paper garlands, $11; Rosettes, $6. Magpie, 488 Amsterdam Ave., (646) 998-3002, magpienewyork.com.
Time moves ahead, at great speed, it seems, and time moves in circles that spiral upward: Each year, we find ourselves back at the beginning of the cycle, but changed, and in a higher place. (Rabbi Edward Greenstein has compared the journey to going up the spiraling ramp of the Guggenheim Museum, when we can look down at last year at each curve, and look ahead as well.) The Misaviv Hebrew Circle Calendar, 5776, from Deuteronomy Press, honors the traditional circular view of time, for “a new old path for the new year.” (Misaviv means “around.”) Beautifully designed in full color, the 13-month calendar features new paintings with original imagery, infused with symbolism, for each month by different artists including Elke Reva Sudin (Kislev), Rebecca Shenfeld (Tevet) and others, with calligraphy by Ted Kadin. Elisha Mendl Mlotek of the band Zusha is creative director. For each month, the weeks begin in the outer circle and moves toward Shabbat in the center; holidays and the weekly Torah portions are noted, along with Hebrew and English dates. We share publisher Jorian Polis Schultz’s greeting, “with blessings for a year of joyful and spiraling ascent.”
Calendar, $25. Circlecalendar.com.
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our
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BETWEEN THE LINES
Gary Rosenblatt
The Fault Lines Within Us
Rosh HaShanah is upon us but it doesn't feel like we're ready this year.
It's got nothing to do with the timing because the High Holy Day season is neither "early" nor "late" as we approach 5776. Rather, it's about an increasingly fractious Jewish community that at year's end appears more eager to make charges against each other than make amends with each other, as our rabbis instruct.
Read More
Gary Rosenblatt
The Fault Lines Within Us
A key element of repentance is asking directly for forgiveness, and that’s where we have a problem this year.
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Rosh HaShanah is upon us but it doesn’t feel like we’re ready this year.
It’s got nothing to do with the timing because the High Holy Day season is neither “early” nor “late” as we approach 5776. Rather, it’s about an increasingly fractious Jewish community that at year’s end appears more eager to make charges against each other than make amends with each other, as our rabbis instruct.
This annual penitential season should be all about self-reflection, prayer and a commitment to change ourselves for the better. In the synagogue we ask God for forgiveness for our transgressions, a private matter between our Creator and us. But as our tradition makes clear, a key element of repentance is asking directly for forgiveness from family, friends and others whom we’ve wronged. And that’s where we as a community, as a people, have a problem this year.
Despite too many tragic, traumatic events that should have drawn us closer — from last summer’s Gaza war to the murder of four rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue to the killing of four Jews in a Paris supermarket — we have grown farther apart. One of the very issues that used to strengthen bonds between us — love and support for Israel — has pitted us against each other. And it has played out this year over the policies and actions of Prime Minister Netanyahu during national elections in March, and, even more so over the Iran nuclear deal, with its existentially high stakes for the Jewish state. The resulting bitter divide among us — pro and con on the deal — has exposed a series of painful truths.
One is that the worldviews of Israel and the United States are not in sync, as we long believed, but are diverging. Washington seeks rapprochement with an Iran that Israel sees as a mortal danger to be confronted. The White House believes that Mideast security will be enhanced by at least slowing down Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and encouraging Tehran to moderate its expansionist behavior over the next decade. Jerusalem insists the agreement guarantees rather than blocks Iran’s path to the bomb, rewards the theocracy diplomatically despite its terror activities, and, with the release of sanctions, allows it to increase military funding for Hezbollah and other terror fronts.
This year we have witnessed the already acrid personal relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu deteriorate in a very public way, threatening the foundational bipartisan support for Israel in Washington.
The arguments about the wisdom or folly of the Iran deal have gone on, back and forth, for many months now, with positions hardening, voices growing shriller and accusations ratcheting up. Thoughtful people should come away from it all appreciating the complexity of the situation, humbled by cogent points on both sides, and accepting that people of integrity, with the welfare of Israel and the U.S. at heart, can end up disagreeing over whether the Iran deal is better than no deal.
Too often, that has not been the case. Another of the painful truths is that even within our own community, we no longer debate. We demonize. Each side is convinced that if the other prevails the result will be disastrous. With the stakes so high we have abandoned fairness, compassion and empathy.
Supporters of the agreement suggest that its critics may be guilty of dual loyalty, and are all too eager to see the U.S. go to war again in the Mideast. Those opposed to the deal accuse supporters of selling out and betraying Israel rather than trying to protect the Jewish state.
This season of repentance is the time we should be stepping back, taking a deep breath, acknowledging that those who disagree with us may have done so for honorable reasons. We should be seeking each other out to ask forgiveness for our words and actions. After all, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur give us the opportunity to start the new year with a clean slate.
Instead we are too busy assessing blame, pledging to harden our hearts against politicians and others with whom we disagree, and holding grudges against — rather than holding hands with — our fellow Jews.
For a people so obsessed with its survival and continuity, we are very good at marginalizing those members of the tribe with whom we disagree politically, religiously and socially, making our collaborative circles ever smaller.
In this past year we have witnessed a sharp and shameful rise in anti-Semitism in Europe and an Israel that has become increasingly embattled and isolated. And the raging controversy over the Iran agreement has frayed what’s left of our sense of Jewish unity. It has been a brutal and frightening year. But our tradition teaches us to have hope and faith in the future.
Before we expect our prayers and pleas to be accepted on High, though, surely we must first open our own hearts to those with whom we share a rich history and common destiny. Now is the time to ask — and offer — forgiveness. In the end, all we have is each other.
Shanah Tovah.
Gary@jewishweek.org
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rejoice Now
Rosh HaShanah is the only holiday without a limit. It literally celebrates everything.
Other holidays celebrate events in history, or the relationship between God and Israel. But Rosh HaShanah celebrates the creation of the world; in other words, it is a song of gratitude for all that exists. We blow the shofar on Rosh HaShanah because if we sleepwalk through life we are violating the essence of the holiday - to see and feel joy in the created world and the God who made it. Indifference is the enemy, ennui the sin, embrace the answer.
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rejoice Now
Rosh HaShanah is the only holiday without a limit. It literally celebrates everything.
Other holidays celebrate events in history, or the relationship between God and Israel. But Rosh HaShanah celebrates the creation of the world; in other words, it is a song of gratitude for all that exists. We blow the shofar on Rosh HaShanah because if we sleepwalk through life we are violating the essence of the holiday - to see and feel joy in the created world and the God who made it. Indifference is the enemy, ennui the sin, embrace the answer.
Read More
Rejoice Now
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rosh HaShanah is the only holiday without a limit. It literally celebrates everything.
Other holidays celebrate events in history, or the relationship between God and Israel. But Rosh HaShanah celebrates the creation of the world; in other words, it is a song of gratitude for all that exists. We blow the shofar on Rosh HaShanah because if we sleepwalk through life we are violating the essence of the holiday — to see and feel joy in the created world and the God who made it. Indifference is the enemy, ennui the sin, embrace the answer.
The holiday that follows, Yom Kippur, is a symbolic enactment of death. We do not eat or bathe, and we dress in shrouds. Those who have not been grateful on Rosh HaShanah are asked to imagine what it would be like to be without the world. What if there were no love, no words or music or mountains or sky? Perhaps only after Yom Kippur can we fully appreciate the message of Rosh HaShanah. One day all this will be gone for you. Rejoice now; celebrate now; hold the world and those you love close. Shana Tovah Umetukah — a happy and sweet New Year
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
The canals of Venice - California's, not Italy's - offer a scenic venue for a colorful look at California culture. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
If You've Got A Few Hours To Kill...
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
About 15 years ago, on my way to a meeting in Los Angeles, I received word that it had been cancelled. My flight left early the next morning - but I suddenly had an entire evening at my disposal, on a coast with spectacular sunsets.
So I turned my rental car west toward Santa Monica. I parked on a block of 1920s bungalows and towering palms, bought an ice cream cone, and spent several blissful hours strolling along the cliff-top park overlooking Santa Monica beach, the famous pier, the mountains of Malibu - and that exquisite, incomparable Pacific sunset.
The holiday that follows, Yom Kippur, is a symbolic enactment of death. We do not eat or bathe, and we dress in shrouds. Those who have not been grateful on Rosh HaShanah are asked to imagine what it would be like to be without the world. What if there were no love, no words or music or mountains or sky? Perhaps only after Yom Kippur can we fully appreciate the message of Rosh HaShanah. One day all this will be gone for you. Rejoice now; celebrate now; hold the world and those you love close. Shana Tovah Umetukah — a happy and sweet New Year
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
The canals of Venice - California's, not Italy's - offer a scenic venue for a colorful look at California culture. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
If You've Got A Few Hours To Kill...
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
About 15 years ago, on my way to a meeting in Los Angeles, I received word that it had been cancelled. My flight left early the next morning - but I suddenly had an entire evening at my disposal, on a coast with spectacular sunsets.
So I turned my rental car west toward Santa Monica. I parked on a block of 1920s bungalows and towering palms, bought an ice cream cone, and spent several blissful hours strolling along the cliff-top park overlooking Santa Monica beach, the famous pier, the mountains of Malibu - and that exquisite, incomparable Pacific sunset.
Read More
Travel
If You’ve Got A Few Hours To Kill…
Travel Writer
Photo Galleria:
The canals of Venice– California's, not Italy's – offer a scenic venue for a colorful look at California's culture. H. Danailova
About 15 years ago, on my way to a meeting in Los Angeles, I received word that it had been cancelled. My flight left early the next morning — but I suddenly had an entire evening at my disposal, on a coast with spectacular sunsets.
So I turned my rental car west toward Santa Monica. I parked on a block of 1920s bungalows and towering palms, bought an ice cream cone, and spent several blissful hours strolling along the cliff-top park overlooking Santa Monica beach, the famous pier, the mountains of Malibu — and that exquisite, incomparable Pacific sunset.
While L.A. is a popular place for vacations, it’s also a place where we sometimes find ourselves with just a little time to kill; we’re on business, visiting relatives or en route elsewhere. Fortunately, America’s Left Coast Jewish hub is a smorgasbord of memorable experiences that can easily be snuck into an itinerary. So the next time you find yourself with a free couple of hours, consider the following diversions:
1. The view from the Sunset Strip, West Hollywood. Past L.A.’s trendiest neighborhood, whose shabby trattorias and Russian delis are cheek by jowl with fashionable nightclubs and new boutiques, the jaw-dropping view over L.A. from the Mondrian Hotel remains indelible. Some are bemoaning the gentrification of the seedy old Sunset Strip, but there’s no turning back progress — and as long as the poshification is here to stay, you might as well enjoy the view. The Mondrian’s super-exclusive Skybar — with cocktails by the rooftop pool — offers one of the most beautiful sights of L.A.
2. Catch some Jewish theater. OK, this is not something you can do with a free morning, but the variety of Jewish cultural life in L.A. is truly outstanding — and on any given week, you can likely fill an evening with Jewish performance. You might luck into a show from Theatre Dybbuk, a progressive ensemble that premieres new works, or the Jewish Women’s Repertory Company, which performs theater that is entirely by and for women.
3. Eating kosher Persian on Westwood Boulevard, a little slice of Tehran in L.A. The Iranian community has enclaves throughout greater L.A., but the small-scale storefronts along Westwood Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of UCLA’s neighborhood, remain its Jewish heart. In addition to numerous Persian eateries – some kosher, some not; some elegant, others casual cafés and tea shops – you’ll stroll by shops selling Iranian movies, Judaica, and books in Farsi, along with the obligatory fro-yo. It’s a tight-knit community, and spending time here is a way to experience L.A. at its most local.
4. Jewish life, al fresco. For this one, you have to scan the Internet to see what’s happening on any particular week. Blessed with a climate that’s sunny, dry and warm (getting warmer) year-round, L.A. Jewish groups frequently celebrate outdoors — everything from Shabbat on the beach (more popular in summer) to plein-air holiday carnivals and cultural festivals that exploit the beauty of local surroundings. For East Coasters used to worshipping indoors, this can be a really unforgettable experience. At some shuls — like the historic Pacific Jewish Center, on the Venice boardwalk — Shabbat is always on the beach.
5. Speaking of Venice: Hit the canals. The counterculture boardwalk is legendary, but many people don’t realize that our Venice has at least one thing in common with Italy’s — a network of picturesque, romantic canals. Tucked into a posh, low-scale bungalow neighborhood near the beach, these canals are just wide enough to be crossed by footbridge or navigated by tiny rowboats — no gondolas here. Nearly every house in this neighborhood is an architectural gem that features airy Californian décor and lush landscaping on full display to all who stroll by. Best of all, these canals are a peaceful, traffic-free escape from the urban bustle.
They’re also home — literally — to one of L.A.’s newest congregations, the Open Temple, a pluralistic and post-denominational group that hosts everything from Sukkot on the canals and Jewish yoga to Venice Shabbat Crawls on nearby Abbot Kinney.
6. Wander over to Culver City — and check out some of Tinseltown’s late Jewish legends. If you haven’t been to this modest West Side area in awhile, you may be surprised at how much funky youthful energy there is in this revitalized hipster ’hood. The walkable center combines historic buildings with outdoor cafés, and most of the people walking around are 20- and 30-something professionals.
Then there are the people no longer walking around – the dozens of deceased Jewish performers, entertainers and Hollywood machers buried at Hillside Jewish Cemetery, whose lavish celebrity graves have drawn star-seekers for decades. The centerpiece here is Al Jolson’s 75-foot-high domed monument overlooking a cascading hillside water fountain, but Shelley Winters, Leonard Nimoy, and Hank Greenberg are among the notable neighbors.
While L.A. is a popular place for vacations, it’s also a place where we sometimes find ourselves with just a little time to kill; we’re on business, visiting relatives or en route elsewhere. Fortunately, America’s Left Coast Jewish hub is a smorgasbord of memorable experiences that can easily be snuck into an itinerary. So the next time you find yourself with a free couple of hours, consider the following diversions:
1. The view from the Sunset Strip, West Hollywood. Past L.A.’s trendiest neighborhood, whose shabby trattorias and Russian delis are cheek by jowl with fashionable nightclubs and new boutiques, the jaw-dropping view over L.A. from the Mondrian Hotel remains indelible. Some are bemoaning the gentrification of the seedy old Sunset Strip, but there’s no turning back progress — and as long as the poshification is here to stay, you might as well enjoy the view. The Mondrian’s super-exclusive Skybar — with cocktails by the rooftop pool — offers one of the most beautiful sights of L.A.
2. Catch some Jewish theater. OK, this is not something you can do with a free morning, but the variety of Jewish cultural life in L.A. is truly outstanding — and on any given week, you can likely fill an evening with Jewish performance. You might luck into a show from Theatre Dybbuk, a progressive ensemble that premieres new works, or the Jewish Women’s Repertory Company, which performs theater that is entirely by and for women.
3. Eating kosher Persian on Westwood Boulevard, a little slice of Tehran in L.A. The Iranian community has enclaves throughout greater L.A., but the small-scale storefronts along Westwood Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of UCLA’s neighborhood, remain its Jewish heart. In addition to numerous Persian eateries – some kosher, some not; some elegant, others casual cafés and tea shops – you’ll stroll by shops selling Iranian movies, Judaica, and books in Farsi, along with the obligatory fro-yo. It’s a tight-knit community, and spending time here is a way to experience L.A. at its most local.
4. Jewish life, al fresco. For this one, you have to scan the Internet to see what’s happening on any particular week. Blessed with a climate that’s sunny, dry and warm (getting warmer) year-round, L.A. Jewish groups frequently celebrate outdoors — everything from Shabbat on the beach (more popular in summer) to plein-air holiday carnivals and cultural festivals that exploit the beauty of local surroundings. For East Coasters used to worshipping indoors, this can be a really unforgettable experience. At some shuls — like the historic Pacific Jewish Center, on the Venice boardwalk — Shabbat is always on the beach.
5. Speaking of Venice: Hit the canals. The counterculture boardwalk is legendary, but many people don’t realize that our Venice has at least one thing in common with Italy’s — a network of picturesque, romantic canals. Tucked into a posh, low-scale bungalow neighborhood near the beach, these canals are just wide enough to be crossed by footbridge or navigated by tiny rowboats — no gondolas here. Nearly every house in this neighborhood is an architectural gem that features airy Californian décor and lush landscaping on full display to all who stroll by. Best of all, these canals are a peaceful, traffic-free escape from the urban bustle.
They’re also home — literally — to one of L.A.’s newest congregations, the Open Temple, a pluralistic and post-denominational group that hosts everything from Sukkot on the canals and Jewish yoga to Venice Shabbat Crawls on nearby Abbot Kinney.
6. Wander over to Culver City — and check out some of Tinseltown’s late Jewish legends. If you haven’t been to this modest West Side area in awhile, you may be surprised at how much funky youthful energy there is in this revitalized hipster ’hood. The walkable center combines historic buildings with outdoor cafés, and most of the people walking around are 20- and 30-something professionals.
Then there are the people no longer walking around – the dozens of deceased Jewish performers, entertainers and Hollywood machers buried at Hillside Jewish Cemetery, whose lavish celebrity graves have drawn star-seekers for decades. The centerpiece here is Al Jolson’s 75-foot-high domed monument overlooking a cascading hillside water fountain, but Shelley Winters, Leonard Nimoy, and Hank Greenberg are among the notable neighbors.
Culver City, L.A. Jewish groups, Los Angeles, Tinseltown, Venice California
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
The 2016 presidential run has left many of us feeling the Bern.
Maya Klausner
Editor
7 Reasons I Have A Jew Crush On Bernie Sanders
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
The 2016 presidential run has left many of us feeling the Bern.
Maya Klausner
Editor
7 Reasons I Have A Jew Crush On Bernie Sanders
SOFT-HITTING NEWS: IF IT'S NOT HERE WE DIDN'T COVER IT
7 Reasons I Have A Jew Crush On Bernie Sanders
C/o JWMG
The Jew crush
Maya Klausner
Editor
Comedy, The Schmear Chronicle
Since the 2016 elections have taken off, the race has been filled with surprises, theater and certainly confusion, thanks to a certain bombastic, toupee denier. One thing that can be said about this run: many are feeling the Bern. Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her pantsuits and is also filling America’s hearts with a bern-ing love.
Here are 7 reasons I have a Jew Crush on Bernie Sanders:
1. The bar-mitzvahed, former Burlington mayor is a 718 original. Sanders was born to Jewish, immigrant parents in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where his signature crazed mane would probably feel right at home these days.
2. He goes by a nickname. Sanders may be the longest-serving independent in U.S. Congressional history, but he isn’t above a good ol’ nickity nack. Way to keep it real Bernie.
3. Sanders famously and staunchly opposed the war in Iraq. Er, yeah, good call on that one.
4. The man has game. When Sanders was in high school, he won the basketball state championship and was captain of the track team.
5. Guy’s got girl power. The progressive candidate is a proud protector and supporter of women’s rights.
6. He doesn’t just talk the talk, (which he does with a pithy eloquence I might add), he also walks the walk. In 1963, Sanders participated in the March on Washington.
7. He knows how to mix it up. Fiji? That’s not for us sweets. The newly married Sanders couple, took their honeymoon in what was formerly The Soviet Union
New York
Don’t Know Much About History
Inside the uphill battle to improve secular education in chasidic yeshivas.
Photo Galleria:
NYC's chasidic boys likely log more classroom time than anyone else. But they graduate barely able to read English. JW Photo
But with a secular education that ended when he was 13, he quickly found out how wrong they were. Unable to read English, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of math, Moshe discovered that the only work he could get was in a Jewish bakery. The hours were long and the pay low. And as a married man, he knew kids were on the way. He had to make more money.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
Don't Know Much About History
Amy Sara Clark and Hella Winston
When Moshe graduated from his chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park two decades ago, he thought getting a job would be easy. After all, growing up, he was always told by his teachers that chasidic people are the most "desirable to hire."
Don’t Know Much About History
Inside the uphill battle to improve secular education in chasidic yeshivas.
Hella Winston and Amy Sara Clark
Photo Galleria:
NYC's chasidic boys likely log more classroom time than anyone else. But they graduate barely able to read English. JW Photo
But with a secular education that ended when he was 13, he quickly found out how wrong they were. Unable to read English, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of math, Moshe discovered that the only work he could get was in a Jewish bakery. The hours were long and the pay low. And as a married man, he knew kids were on the way. He had to make more money.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
So Moshe — who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of backlash from his community — decided to enroll in a computer programming course. But with his limited English, he just couldn’t keep up. He was advised to take an ESL class, but his 60-plus-hour work week got in the way; after a year, he dropped out.
“I tried to do them both, I tried to skip the class but it failed. Every way I tried it failed,” said Moshe, who is now 38. “I had no time to study, I was always busy working. I took the class for a year, a year and a half, I didn’t get anywhere.”
Moshe eventually found his way, making ends meet by driving a taxi. But he feels the deficiencies of his education keenly.
"The most important times in my life, when I was supposed to get an education, I was busy studying their own things,” he said, referring to the six to eight hours a day his school spent on religious studies. “Never got a GED, never graduated high school and stopped English completely. And so I feel that the community failed us.”
Moshe is not alone.
The fact that yeshivas like the one he went to are neglecting to teach their students basic English and math — or any other secular subjects — is hardly a secret. However, the situation — highlighted over the last decade in a spate of books, articles and blogs about chasidic life — has only now captured the attention of public officials.
This summer, for the first time, the New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether these yeshivas are meeting state requirements to provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools offer. And on the heels of the DOE move, The Jewish Week and WNYC have learned, Daniel Dromm, the influential chair of the city council’s education committee, is pledging to hold the schools more accountable.
But reformers, led by a chasidic yeshiva graduate, face an uphill battle, hindered by the same forces that have caused government officials to turn a blind eye for decades. Their fight for better secular education turns on a number of thorny issues, including the separation of church and state, the cozy relationship between local politicians and powerful chasidic leaders thought to control significant voting blocs and questions about whether, in fact, those leaders are purposely neglecting secular education as a way to keep their followers in the fold.
'Not a Single Word of English'
“At 13 kids get cut off completely from secular education and I mean completely. They start yeshiva at 6:45 or 6 and it goes all the way to the evening — 8 or 9 — and they don’t learn a single word of English, or science or math,” said Naftuli Moster.
Moster, 29, who grew up in the Belzer chasidic community in Borough Park in a family of 17 children, has become the face of the movement for yeshiva reform. He started the advocacy group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or Yaffed, after realizing how ill prepared his own yeshiva education left him when he tried to go to college. He described his educational trajectory during an interview at Hunter College, where he recently completed a master’s in social work.
“Imagine a boy coming out of the system. How are they going to know how to do a math problem? Or fill out an application?” he said. “I thought, It shouldn’t be like this. People should be given the basic knowledge to make their way in life.”
That so many of these young men find themselves so hindered in the job market is ironic because, with a 10-to-14-hour school day, chasidic teenage boys in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park, spend more time in school than perhaps any other students in the city.
But nearly all of that time is spent on religious subjects; classes are taught in Yiddish and students study texts written in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
After graduating from yeshiva, some chasidic men elect to continue their religious studies for a year or longer. They are typically supported by a modest stipend from the school, grants through the federal Tuition Assistance Program (more on this later), or, if married, possibly by their wives or their in-laws.
It wasn’t always this way.
Growing Up, And Apart
Chasidim first began arriving in America en masse after World War II. Led by a few charismatic rebbes who had survived the Holocaust, they set about rebuilding the world they had lost in Europe. Men were encouraged to go to work so they could support their families (unlike their non-chasidic, ultra-Orthodox counterparts, chasidim did not have a tradition of full-time religious study for men). And even though post-war chasidic parents raised their children to speak Yiddish, they also got a solid secular education.
Indeed, a 1959 profile of Williamsburg’s fledgling Satmar community, published in Commentary magazine, noted that “Despite the Hasidic belief that Torah and Talmud teach all necessary astronomy, physics, and mathematics, the children appear to be getting a secular education beyond that required by the state Board of Regents.” And unlike today, playing ball was not yet considered too “goyish”: The Commentary writer observed a 15-year-old with a yarmulke and peyes “sinking hoops with two non-Hasidic fellow players.”
Over the next five and a half decades, Brooklyn’s chasidic population exploded, growing from what scholars estimate was roughly 50,000 in the mid-1960s to, according to the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2011 Jewish population study, 225,000 in 2011.
During that time, chasidic communities (with the exception of the Lubavitchers, who are known for their outreach to unaffiliated Jews) have also become increasingly insular and self-contained. Using a combination of communal charity and government benefits, they have built businesses, yeshivas and other institutions that, together, meet almost all of their needs. In 2013, the Avi Chai Foundation counted just over 100 chasidic yeshivas in the five boroughs with roughly 58,000 students — making it larger than the public school systems of Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit.
“You don’t have to go to the outside world,” explained a chasidic great-grandmother in a busy Borough Park shop. Like many chasidim, she values the strong boundaries her community has erected to keep outside influences at bay.
“You asked me what do we learn and, well basically, for the most part, No. 1 is to be a mensch, treat people nicely, be honest,” she said. “It teaches you, in my opinion, everything you need to know in life.”
Asked about Yaffed’s effort to bring more secular instruction into yeshivas, she said: “I know there are people out there making a bit of noise, but the majority is so terrific. And we’re so thankful for our insular world here because there is everything that we need here, it offers everything for the person.”
But one thing it no longer offers — with a very few exceptions — is a solid secular education for boys. (Girls are not obligated to study Talmud and, as a result, end up getting a better secular education than boys.)
According to former students and teachers, chasidic boys get the message that the secular classes — 90 minutes at the end of the day, referred to generally as "English," even though it also includes math — are not to be taken seriously.
“Kids try to get away with trouble,” said Moshe, the cab driver. “They never try to take anything serious unless it gets seriously, strictly enforced.”
He described one June afternoon from his youth: “We really felt like the year was almost over, so we tore the books apart and we threw it at the teacher. We would never dare do something like that in Hebrew,” he explained, “because Hebrew we took it very serious … we studied the Torah and the Chumash until the last day of school. But English was more like, we did it just because we had to do it, you know? We didn’t gain much from all these years learning.”
Moshe’s memories sound a lot like those of former secular studies teachers.
“[On my first day, all] of the kids were at the closet where I was told the books would be,” said Greig Roselli, a writer and educator originally from Louisiana, who taught 4th, 5th and 6th graders English and math at Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy (UTA) back in 2010-11.
“But somehow they had opened the closet and taken all the books out and they were strewn all over the place. And I remember this little bitty kid was actually tucked into the top closet and he poked his head out [and yelled]‘Teacha!’ That was my first encounter. I was horrified. I had no idea what was going on.”
Roselli said that the students’ English language proficiency was well below grade level.
“For example, if I gave them a picture of a balloon and said I want you to write a story about this balloon...there might be two or three words that were readable.”
Roselli said that while the parents treated him with respect, it was clear that most had little interest in their children’s progress in secular subjects.
“Every year there was a parent- teacher meeting and only the fathers were there, and we were told to dress nicely and show up and that they would give us money. And they would always be like, ‘thank you so much for teaching my son, we really appreciate what you’re doing.’ But if I tried to talk to them about what their son needed work on” they tuned out.
Steve, who taught at UTA for five years but asked that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his work relationships, recalled an atmosphere where secular learning was considered of little, if any, value--something to be endured by the students until they reached bar mitzvah age and, in the eyes of the community, became men.
“They have a curriculum we fill out and certain times we give tests. And we give them the tests but it doesn't really matter anyway because it gets thrown on some administrator’s desk,” he said.
Many chasidim, however, see this disregard for secular subjects as a mark of the community’s success.
“People talk about secular education as something [that was] necessary [in the founding years], but now that the community is able to thrive without it, it’s no longer necessary,” said Baruch, a young father from Borough Park who asked that only his first name be used because publicly criticizing the community can result in ostracism, or having one’s children expelled from school.
Baruch believes that the lack of secular education has little to do with religion, but is instead a way for chasidic leaders to keep their followers dependent.
“There are many, many religious reasons why one needs secular education. I mean you can go through the Gemara all day and find examples of the use of secular science and secular ideas within the community and the importance of learning a trade and learning these things. Today, learning a trade means learning how to get Section 8 [federal housing subsidies] and get benefits.”
In fact, Baruch thinks that chasidic leaders would rather see their followers take government benefits and community charity than provide them with a good secular education.
“People in the outside of the community love to talk about how many charitable organizations we have,” he said, noting that such charity comes attached to some very tight strings.
“The chasidic community itself is causing people to not be able to work … and then they are providing them with this organization that comes in and says: we’ll solve your problem. … So they are like the mafia. … The same people who are running this organization are the same people who are keeping the yeshivas from offering better alternatives for people who want to have English studies.”
'We Want Things To Stay The Way They Are'
Not everyone sees it that way. Yeshiva University education professor Moshe Krakowski concedes that some chasidic leaders may want to limit secular education in order to maintain control but believes “that’s not what’s making things tick.”
Instead, Krakowski argues, the neglect of secular education is primarily about maintaining the chasidic way of life.
“[They would say], ‘We believe very strongly that this is the way things ought to be, and that it is good. And that our value, overridingly, is the religious tradition we have and we want things to stay the way they are,’” Krakowski said.
Many, like Yaakov German, a property manager and father of 12, agree and argue that knowing a lot of math or English is not necessary to be successful.
“I have five brothers. Each and every one of them opened businesses without going to any college, without anything,” he said on a bustling Borough Park street this summer.
“If you look at the real numbers,” he continued, “all the people that went to college and wasted 14 years, 16 years to get the grades and more scores, are not even making $50,000 a year. They wasted most of the years already where they were able to have already three homes.” (German is a local hero in the chasidic community for using footage from dozens of security cameras to help solve the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in 2011.)
Others are quick to note that if someone wants more job training, there are numerous ways to get it within the community. They point to programs like those offered by Machon L'Parnasa--a division of Touro College in Borough Park that holds classes leading to a certificate and/or associate's degree in fields like accounting, desktop publishing and medical coding and billing--and the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America’s COPE Institute, which runs a highly regarded accounting course and provides free job placement assistance upon its completion.
But for people like Moshe, whose basic skills are so lacking, even these programs can be difficult to make use of.
Ezra Friedlander, a chasidic PR consultant and lobbyist who works with Agudath Israel of America, agrees that secular education — especially vocational — should be improved, but not if that means sacrificing the sheltered life his community has created for its children.
“Look, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview in his sun-drenched Borough Park apartment filled with Judaica and drawings by his three young children.
“As a father I’m concerned with the secular influence of society. I think secular society has failed us. And this is coming from someone that interacts and engages the secular world 24/7, almost, so no one can accuse me of being insular,” he said.
“Still, it’s a legitimate fear out there. And sometimes it comes at a price. And sometimes the price is less of a secular education,” he added. “I’m willing to pay the price.”
Change in Numbers
Whatever their motive, yeshivas that do not offer an education equivalent to that of the public schools — which includes teaching secular subjects until the age of 16 — are violating the law. Plenty of officials know this. But until this summer, none has taken any action.
The government response did not come as a result of the growing number of books and memoirs describing life in chasidic communities, nor the four years of letters, phone calls and meetings Yaffed’s Moster had with education and elected officials. Even the Yiddish-language billboards Yaffed put up in chasidic neighborhoods to raise awareness of the problem failed to elicit a reaction from officials.
What made the difference was numbers. This summer, Yaffed and its lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, got the signatures of 52 former students, teachers and parents who asked for an investigation into claims of substandard secular instruction in 39 yeshivas.
And that got a response: the city's education officials have launched an investigation, requesting documents from the yeshivas. But they have no plans to visit any of the schools in person and will not say what criteria they will be judged on.
No yeshiva administrators or chasidic community leaders contacted would comment for the story; The Jewish Week and WNYC, working together on this story, contacted representatives from the Satmar and Lubavitch school systems, the charedi umbrella organization Agudath Israel, the national yeshiva association Torah Umesorah as well as numerous chasidic yeshivas, including two of the largest: Williamsburg’s UTA, where Steve and Roselli taught, and Yeshiva Machzikei Hadas Belz in Borough Park, Moster’s alma mater.
But some individuals have spoken out publicly against Moster, who, because he no longer lives in the chasidic community, is viewed by many within it as a disgruntled troublemaker.
Friedlander, the PR consultant, says he believes secular education needs to be improved, but that it has to happen from inside the community, not by an outsider like Moster.
“When someone leaves the community, then threatens the community with an investigation ... that is probably the most counterproductive action that one could take. And that tells me that this person is bent on vengeance as opposed to enhancing the system,” he said.
Moster says personal attacks like these, and the threat of being ostracized, are exactly what keep people quiet, and make change from within an unrealistic goal.
He believes the only way change will happen is through government enforcement. But he — and many others — thinks politicians are afraid, too.
Don't Ask, Don't Care
Baruch, the young Borough Park father, thinks it’s pretty clear why elected officials have looked the other way: Votes.
“The voting bloc is so strong. It means a lot to a lot of elected officials. ... And the community really stresses that it’s very important for us to vote in a bloc because that's where our power is,” he said.
Just after Yaffed hired Siegel last fall, the former ACLU director sent a letter to the mayor, the governor and city and state education officials asking to meet about the issue. He never heard back.
“What was remarkable is that in all the years that I’ve been doing what I do, when you write a letter to elected officials and appointed officials of that stature, you get a response,” he said. “The only thing that I can conclude at this point, and maybe I’m wrong, is that the fear is a political fear, that [the chasidic community] is politically powerful to the point that elected officials, including the governor, the attorney general and the mayor of the city of New York are not prepared to confront this issue.”
Yaffed and Siegel tried again in February, this time sending the superintendents overseeing the districts with chasidic schools a list of 27 specific yeshivas that should be investigated. Again, they heard nothing.
It was not until July, after Yaffed sent its letter boasting 52 signatures and citing 39 yeshivas, that the Department of Education finally promised to investigate, a story first reported by The Jewish Week and WNYC.
The Councilman Stands Alone
But the city’s decision to rely only on documents provided by the schools has concerned education advocates, like Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the council’s education committee.
“I would expect that they would have high standards in this. That they would go to the schools. That they would visit. That they would interview students and that they would do a thorough investigation of what exactly is happening or not happening in these schools,” he said during an interview in his Jackson Heights district office.
“We can’t have students leaving schools in New York City that can’t speak English, that have no idea of science or history or social studies,” he continued. “That is not allowed by the state and we cannot continue to allow that to happen anywhere in the state.”
He said that if the DOE probe doesn’t expand past documents, he will use his authority as the education committee chair to conduct his own investigation — with site visits, student interviews and possibly a public hearing.
No other city or state education official would speak on the record, but Mayor Bill de Blasio sent The Jewish Week a statement vowing “zero tolerance” for subpar secular education at chasidic yeshivas. Three weeks later, Williamsburg Councilman Stephen Levin issued his own statement defending them by saying he’s “visited yeshivas in Williamsburg and [has] seen secular education taking place first-hand.”
The more than a dozen other politicians The Jewish Week and WNYC contacted either did not respond to multiple requests for comment or declined to comment. They include Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and Midwood Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who chairs the education subcommittee on non-public schools. The list also includes the six city and state officials representing Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Dromm said he’s not surprised.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of the vote, particularly as it relates to chasidic and Orthodox communities. And I understand the politics of that,” he said. “However as an educator, a New York City public school teacher for 25 years before I got elected to the council, I feel that we cannot allow a situation that ultimately would amount to abuse, or neglect, of students."
Because Kids Don't Vote
Cardozo law professor Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state issues, agrees that this kind of political pandering harms children.
“If your only concern as an elected official is re-election, without any concern about all of the children in one community, you have utterly abandoned your obligations under the U.S. and the New York constitutions,” she said.
“What this tells you,” she added, “is that children don't vote and these politicians don't care.”
Indeed, advocates for reform have expressed concern over Mayor de Blasio’s close ties to the chasidic community, pointing to the mayor’s fulfillment of a campaign promise to drop the unpopular parental consent forms for the controversial circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh. In the ritual, a mohel sucks on a newborn’s penis to draw out the flow of blood, a practice that has been linked to the deaths of two infants from the herpes virus. He also streamlined the reimbursement process for special education, something Orthodox groups have been strenuously lobbying for.
At a campaign stop in Williamsburg a few days before the 2013 mayoral primary, a Satmar leader described de Blasio as having “a proven record of sensitivity to the Jewish community.”
“We have no doubt that Bill de Blasio will continue to prove himself loyal to our community when he is in City Hall,” he said. “He's an honest man, a true and trusted friend who will make a great mayor.”
Some people think that loyalty — and a desire to be re-elected — may be the reason the city isn’t making school visits or student interviews a part of its probe.
One possible sign they may be right is the DOE’s stonewalling of the The Jewish Week’s Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for public documents relating to past complaints about chasidic yeshivas. It has delayed its response for five months, citing the “volume and complexity” of the “requests we receive and process.”
The department outright denied a FOIL request for the names of the 39 schools cited by Yaffed, which the nonprofit refused to make public to demonstrate that its fight is with the government, not the yeshivas. In that instance, the DOE said releasing the documents would interfere with an law-enforcement investigation (a spokesman clarified that this referred to its own probe into whether education laws are being enforced with respect to these yeshivas).
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Novell said the mayor’s relationship with the chasidic community has no influence over the DOE’s decisions regarding the yeshiva probe. "The state law is very clear,” he said, that when the DOE gets a complaint, it must investigate and, if necessary, “and enforce corrective actions to ensure students are receiving a strong and equivalent education,” he told The Jewish Week via email. “And the Department has followed those rules to the letter. No one is above the law, and everyone is held to the same standard."
Gov. Cuomo has an even longer connection with the chasidic community than de Blasio, reaching back to when his father was governor.
At a campaign stop in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel during the run-up to his first gubernatorial election in 2010, a Satmar leader introduced the soon-to-be governor by saying, “You didn’t come over here for an endorsement, because this community would have endorsed you regardless. … We wanted to let you know that we are family.”
In his first year in office, Cuomo pushed through a bill making millions in tuition aid available to rabbinical college students. This was part of the same budget that cut funding to public colleges and universities by 10 percent.
On the eve of the 2014 election, Cuomo received $90,000 in donations from Orthodox realtors in Brooklyn and this May, days after he vetoed a bill aimed at stopping the expansion of Kiryas Joel, he received $250,000 from a network of companies linked to a developer from the upstate village.
Cuomo’s press office did not return messages requesting comment.
'But We Need More Money'
Some fear that these close political relationships will lead to a push by yeshivas to secure more government funds, something some members of the community have already begun to argue is necessary to improve the quality of secular education. And indeed funding was a topic of discussion on a recent broadcast of Talkine, the popular Orthodox radio show hosted by Zev Brenner.
That evening, a woman going by the name of Henya called into the show, saying that, “I pay taxes and I’m double-dipped. I have to pay double, twice, for the kids and for somebody else who just got off the boat to go to school.”
Henya’s comment reflects the concerns of many private and parochial school parents who feel strapped because they not only pay taxes for public schools they don’t use, but private school tuition for their own children.
But there are those who argue that more funding would not necessarily address the problem, and that it would also raise serious constitutional issues.
“As a general rule, the government cannot fund religious institutions and that applies not just to the yeshivas, but the parochial Catholic schools and any Muslim schools” as well, said Norman Siegel.
However, Siegel said that in the last 25 years the Supreme Court “has carved out some limited exceptions to that general principle”--exceptions that have basically been followed by the New York state legislature and court of appeals.
In practice, this means that yeshivas in New York get millions of dollars from the city and state, including funds for things like school nurses, textbooks, busing, lunch programs, special and remedial education and universal pre-K.
In fact, according to state education department documents, New York City’s Jewish schools received just over $51 million this year in state funding, or .18 percent of the Department of Education’s total budget of $27.6 billion. In addition, they have an estimated $57 million due to them for state-mandated programs in past years.
Chasidic yeshivas also get tens of millions in federal dollars, including Title I funding for schools in low-income districts, Title III funding for English-language learners and even funds for computer and Internet technology.
However, Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Committee who specializes in church-state issues, says the scant secular education offered by so many chasidic yeshivas has little to do with money.
“The objections to extensive secular education are primarily ideological. They are not primarily financial,” he said.
“If the question was, were the science classes taught in up-to-date labs with microscopes and fancy DNA sifting equipment and so on, then money is the answer,” he added. “If nothing is taught where a history course can be taught for the price of a textbook and the state subsidizes it, if that course isn’t offered at all, that has very little to do with money.”
Stern added that, “If somebody were to offer Satmar a million dollars a kid you’re still not going to see arts and humanities courses.”
Indeed, according to government records, Satmar, one of the largest chasidic groups, got about $20 million in federal aid last year for its Brooklyn schools alone (Satmar also has schools in upstate communities). And that’s compared to the entire Archdiocese of New York, which got $9 million.
Over the years, there has been little oversight of all this money going to the chasidic community. And there have been cases of fraud.
In 1999, a group of chasidim was convicted of funneling millions in federal aid to religious institutions and private bank accounts. That was the same year a Williamsburg principal pleaded guilty to giving dozens of chasidic women no-show teaching jobs. And in 2013, The Jewish Week discovered more than a dozen chasidic yeshivas were reaping tens of millions to fund non-existent computer and Internet technology.
Cardozo’s Marci Hamilton says misuse of government funds is not unique to one community and that, “The problem with every government funding program is that there are those who will take advantage of it and expand the categories well beyond what the government intended.”
She says that this is “probably as much a problem of government accountability as it is of schools taking advantage of the government not really paying attention.”
None of these issues — the power of the chasidic voting bloc, the misuse of funds or the challenges of governmental oversight — is lost on Yaffed’s lawyer, Norman Siegel. And he is well aware that politics could derail the effort to ensure that chasidic children are getting the kind of education mandated by law.
“This is a hot political issue. It’s radioactive,” he said.
But Siegel also believes that depriving these students of a secular education is a violation of their rights. And that ensuring that the law is enforced is the right thing to do.
“When it comes time for elections, this should be an issue that people should be aware of. And for elected officials in high positions who ignore the violation of civil rights, history says that sooner or later, they’re held politically accountable.”
Hella Winston is special correspondent; Amy Sara Clark is deputy managing editor. The story was made possible by The Jewish Week Investigative Fund. This story is the result of a joint investigation between The Jewish Week and WNYC, which will air the companion radio series over four days beginning Sept. 8. You can hear the stories online at WNYC.org.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Princeton, N.J. - They are the downsizers. And perhaps the uplifters.
At a time when "starchitects" are building soaring residences in the sky, some rising to 80 or 90 stories, a small group of lower-profile architects is trying to redefine the worship experience for struggling synagogues often burdened by outdated, outsized and inefficient sanctuaries.
The Shape Of Worship To Come A small group of architects is redefining sacred spaces, and perhaps reinvogorating synagogues in the proces
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photo Galleria:
At a time when “starchitects” are building soaring residences in the sky, some rising to 80 or 90 stories, a small group of lower-profile architects is trying to redefine the worship experience for struggling synagogues often burdened by outdated, outsized and inefficient sanctuaries.
Their mandate: intimacy is all.
“We do more with less,” said Joshua Zinder of the firm Landau Zinder based here. “You want to inspire,” Michael Landau said of the firm’s architectural goal. “We can shape the spiritual experience.”
As Jews by the tens of thousands flock to synagogue next week for the Jewish New Year, more will be praying and singing in leaner and greener worship spaces, ones more in line with the demographic and economic realities of today’s Jewish community.
But over the years, for far too many congregants in far too many synagogues around the country, the “spiritual experience” Landau speaks of has been diluted, as members dropped away and often-cavernous sanctuaries fell into disrepair. One such synagogue is the on-the-rebound Jersey City congregation, Temple Beth-El.
At a business networking meeting here a year ago, Zinder got into a conversation with a member of the temple. Zinder learned that it, like many urban Jewish congregations, had experienced a decline in membership since its high point in the 1950s and ’60s, and “was at a turning point.” Beth-El’s 89-year-old building needed extensive repairs, it didn’t have enough money to pay for them and the synagogue officers considered selling the site and moving.
Don’t make a decision yet, Zinder told the temple member; let me come see the building and meet with the officers.
“Maybe we can help.”
The two architects are part of a firm formed just three years ago that specializes in renovating Jewish houses of worship, transforming synagogues from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to the Berkshires to Plano, Texas. A generation apart (Zinder is 47; Landau, 73), the two bring a similar streamlining ethic to their projects, which, like Temple Beth-El, are often small congregations with limited budgets.
One night, a week after the initial conversation, Zinder drove to Jersey City. Sitting in the Temple Beth-El balcony, a sketchpad and #2 pencil in hand, he listened to several synagogue officers and Rabbi Debra Hachen, the congregation’s spiritual leader for four years, describe the situation. Membership was down to some 180 family units, from 600 in its heyday. The sanctuary, whose 900 seats once were filled to capacity, seemed eerily empty to the several dozen worshipers who would come on a typical Shabbat. Thieves in 2011 had stolen the copper tiles from the roof, which was leaking. The shul could not afford the repairs.
Based on some preliminary sketches, on a study of the congregation’s history and its anticipated growth in the next decade, and on subsequent meetings with other Temple Beth-El members, Zinder and Landau submitted a design for the Byzantine Revival building’s renovation, repair and redesign. The plans include downsizing seating in the 11,000-square-foot sanctuary to seat a maximum of 450, replacing the fixed pews with moveable seating, building classroom space in what is now the balcony, adding a new elevator and bathrooms, renovating the social hall and other rooms in the basement, installing an air conditioning system and handicap-accessible ramps, taking advantage of natural lighting from now-blocked windows, and moving the sanctuary’s bima from the western side to the traditional, eastern side.
“He understood our vision very well — people need a place to call [their spiritual] home,” Rabbi Hachen said.
Temple Beth-El (betheljc.org), which put the architects’ plan to a successful membership vote, has begun a $3 million fundraising “Kadimah!” campaign for the project.
The Jersey City synagogue is typical of many urban congregations that have experienced decreases in membership and increases in operating expenses in recent decades. And Landau Zinder is part of a growing trend — architectural firms that are called upon to renovate extant synagogue buildings, rather than build new ones.
“As construction costs continue to rise, many congregations are faced with the realization that they need to be very realistic about what they can afford to build,” said Julian Preisler, a historian and author of a series of books about synagogues in the U.S. “Many congregations are closing, merging or selling large expensive buildings and building smaller, more functional synagogues. ‘Green’ technology seems to be growing. Synagogue design is now much more simple, clean and devoid of a lot of architectural embellishment. This firm seems to work well with the realities of synagogue design today.”
Like Temple Beth El in Jersey City, the 720-family Midway Jewish Center on Long Island underwent an extensive renovation that ended earlier this year. New additions included a reconfiguration of the sanctuary to make it more intimate, the addition of a handicap-accessible ramp, and the establishment of a separate space in the foyer for yahrtzeit plaques.
“It was not an expensive renovation. It was less than $1 million,” said Rabbi Raphael Rank, the congregation’s spiritual leader. The building, on the border of Syosset and Plainview, is in “a very fine location, so moving elsewhere was unnecessary, not to mention the greater cost such a move would incur,” Rabbi Rank said.
Two architectural firms played a role in the building’s renovation — Ascalon Studios in West Berlin, N.J.; and Levin/Brown in Owings Mills, Md.
“The [renovated] sanctuary gives us an entirely new feel — greater intimacy and less hierarchy,” Rabbi Rank said. “Architecture reflects the spiritual values of a congregation. Too often in Jewish history, synagogue architecture was victim to the stricture of a repressive ecclesiastical authority. The American Jewish community is now in a position to tastefully and artistically express its deepest feelings about Judaism free of censure.”
Mark Levin of Levin/Brown, which has worked on some 150 synagogue projects in the last three decades, said that his firm’s renovation of old synagogue buildings has “marginally increased,” and that his designs reflect a congregation’s “programmatic changes in worship” and a synagogue’s “emphasis on building relationships.”
In Jersey City, Rabbi Hachen said Zinder and Landau put into physical terms the spiritual needs of her congregation, showing that it makes more economic sense to upgrade the extant building than to build a new one a few miles away.
Having to move, Zinder said, is the situation that many aging synagogues have faced in the last half-century, since many Jews in this country moved to the suburbs from the inner city.
“Often the spiritual value of the built temple space has deteriorated over time,” Landau said. “We seek to restore that value.”
Other local synagogues whose redesign the firm is coordinating include Temple Tikvah, in New Hyde Park, L.I.; and B’nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The handful of congregations with which Landau Zinder is now working — and the several dozen congrgations of all denominations for which the partners have drawn up similar renovation plans — show that renovations on old buildings can trump construction of new ones, Zinder said. “A synagogue that wants to make significant changes can achieve this.”
Landau Zinder is among a handful of architectural firms in the United States whose full-time or part-time expertise is synagogues. All, Zinder and Landau said, deal with contemporary preferences and economic realities and evolving aesthetic preferences. Young Jews, whether in the city or suburb, favor less-conspicuous synagogue buildings than their parents and grandparents built. Small is the new big. They “don’t want to be seen from the street,” Zinder said. Young Jews, in either location, want synagogues that can serve as multi-purpose educational-and-social centers. And the synagogues of young Jews usually have limited financial resources.
“Young people don’t want their parents’ synagogue,” said Zinder, who was named Architect of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Architects last year.
“We have to design something that is economical,” Landau said. His goal: “Something that has a spiritual value, but has the ability to accommodate secular activities.”
The partners, who share a longstanding interest in designing synagogues, met at the Princeton Jewish Center, where they served on the congregation’s building committee. “I’ve seen the [building] process from the other side,” Zinder said.
Zinder and Landau “clearly use a postmodern approach with regard to design,” Preisler told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Many synagogue architects use elements from Eastern European wooden synagogues as well as incorporate elements evoking a modern Israeli style — large stone blocks, rows of upper windows. This firm seems to like a lot of natural light and worship spaces that can be multi-purpose.”
The Landau Zinder firm typically designs every facet of its synagogue projects, including a sanctuary’s bima table and Ner Tamid light. Said Landau: “It’s my contribution to Judaism.”
Jersey City, whose Jewish population had decreased from an estimated 13,000 60 years ago to 5,200 in 1980 but bounced back to a current 6,000, was once home to “dozens of shuls,” Rabbi Hachen said. “It was a very Jewish place.”
Now, most of the city’s synagogues have closed; only four remain.
In recent years, several young Jewish families have settled in Jersey City, attracted by its low housing costs, good public school system and convenient commute to jobs in New York City, the rabbi said. An increase in the synagogue’s membership to 250 family units in the next few years is realistic, she said. “It’s a growing urban area.”
The new members of Temple Beth-El include large numbers of attorneys, teachers and people in the real estate industry; there are few very wealthy people among them, Rabbi Hachen said.
So the congregation has instituted a “phased-in” five-year fundraising campaign, and established a non-profit corporation, The Friends of Temple Beth-El Jersey City.
Renovations will probably start sometime in 2016.
An architectural firm makes more money from constructing a new building than renovating an old one, Zinder said. But the spiritual needs of a site like Temple Beth-El — “It has a sense of history” — outweigh the bottom line, he said.
Zinder said he and Landau have no regrets about advising a congregation to renovate rather than rebuild. “For us it’s the right thing.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Their mandate: intimacy is all.
“We do more with less,” said Joshua Zinder of the firm Landau Zinder based here. “You want to inspire,” Michael Landau said of the firm’s architectural goal. “We can shape the spiritual experience.”
As Jews by the tens of thousands flock to synagogue next week for the Jewish New Year, more will be praying and singing in leaner and greener worship spaces, ones more in line with the demographic and economic realities of today’s Jewish community.
But over the years, for far too many congregants in far too many synagogues around the country, the “spiritual experience” Landau speaks of has been diluted, as members dropped away and often-cavernous sanctuaries fell into disrepair. One such synagogue is the on-the-rebound Jersey City congregation, Temple Beth-El.
At a business networking meeting here a year ago, Zinder got into a conversation with a member of the temple. Zinder learned that it, like many urban Jewish congregations, had experienced a decline in membership since its high point in the 1950s and ’60s, and “was at a turning point.” Beth-El’s 89-year-old building needed extensive repairs, it didn’t have enough money to pay for them and the synagogue officers considered selling the site and moving.
Don’t make a decision yet, Zinder told the temple member; let me come see the building and meet with the officers.
“Maybe we can help.”
The two architects are part of a firm formed just three years ago that specializes in renovating Jewish houses of worship, transforming synagogues from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to the Berkshires to Plano, Texas. A generation apart (Zinder is 47; Landau, 73), the two bring a similar streamlining ethic to their projects, which, like Temple Beth-El, are often small congregations with limited budgets.
One night, a week after the initial conversation, Zinder drove to Jersey City. Sitting in the Temple Beth-El balcony, a sketchpad and #2 pencil in hand, he listened to several synagogue officers and Rabbi Debra Hachen, the congregation’s spiritual leader for four years, describe the situation. Membership was down to some 180 family units, from 600 in its heyday. The sanctuary, whose 900 seats once were filled to capacity, seemed eerily empty to the several dozen worshipers who would come on a typical Shabbat. Thieves in 2011 had stolen the copper tiles from the roof, which was leaking. The shul could not afford the repairs.
Based on some preliminary sketches, on a study of the congregation’s history and its anticipated growth in the next decade, and on subsequent meetings with other Temple Beth-El members, Zinder and Landau submitted a design for the Byzantine Revival building’s renovation, repair and redesign. The plans include downsizing seating in the 11,000-square-foot sanctuary to seat a maximum of 450, replacing the fixed pews with moveable seating, building classroom space in what is now the balcony, adding a new elevator and bathrooms, renovating the social hall and other rooms in the basement, installing an air conditioning system and handicap-accessible ramps, taking advantage of natural lighting from now-blocked windows, and moving the sanctuary’s bima from the western side to the traditional, eastern side.
“He understood our vision very well — people need a place to call [their spiritual] home,” Rabbi Hachen said.
Temple Beth-El (betheljc.org), which put the architects’ plan to a successful membership vote, has begun a $3 million fundraising “Kadimah!” campaign for the project.
The Jersey City synagogue is typical of many urban congregations that have experienced decreases in membership and increases in operating expenses in recent decades. And Landau Zinder is part of a growing trend — architectural firms that are called upon to renovate extant synagogue buildings, rather than build new ones.
“As construction costs continue to rise, many congregations are faced with the realization that they need to be very realistic about what they can afford to build,” said Julian Preisler, a historian and author of a series of books about synagogues in the U.S. “Many congregations are closing, merging or selling large expensive buildings and building smaller, more functional synagogues. ‘Green’ technology seems to be growing. Synagogue design is now much more simple, clean and devoid of a lot of architectural embellishment. This firm seems to work well with the realities of synagogue design today.”
Like Temple Beth El in Jersey City, the 720-family Midway Jewish Center on Long Island underwent an extensive renovation that ended earlier this year. New additions included a reconfiguration of the sanctuary to make it more intimate, the addition of a handicap-accessible ramp, and the establishment of a separate space in the foyer for yahrtzeit plaques.
“It was not an expensive renovation. It was less than $1 million,” said Rabbi Raphael Rank, the congregation’s spiritual leader. The building, on the border of Syosset and Plainview, is in “a very fine location, so moving elsewhere was unnecessary, not to mention the greater cost such a move would incur,” Rabbi Rank said.
Two architectural firms played a role in the building’s renovation — Ascalon Studios in West Berlin, N.J.; and Levin/Brown in Owings Mills, Md.
“The [renovated] sanctuary gives us an entirely new feel — greater intimacy and less hierarchy,” Rabbi Rank said. “Architecture reflects the spiritual values of a congregation. Too often in Jewish history, synagogue architecture was victim to the stricture of a repressive ecclesiastical authority. The American Jewish community is now in a position to tastefully and artistically express its deepest feelings about Judaism free of censure.”
Mark Levin of Levin/Brown, which has worked on some 150 synagogue projects in the last three decades, said that his firm’s renovation of old synagogue buildings has “marginally increased,” and that his designs reflect a congregation’s “programmatic changes in worship” and a synagogue’s “emphasis on building relationships.”
In Jersey City, Rabbi Hachen said Zinder and Landau put into physical terms the spiritual needs of her congregation, showing that it makes more economic sense to upgrade the extant building than to build a new one a few miles away.
Having to move, Zinder said, is the situation that many aging synagogues have faced in the last half-century, since many Jews in this country moved to the suburbs from the inner city.
“Often the spiritual value of the built temple space has deteriorated over time,” Landau said. “We seek to restore that value.”
Other local synagogues whose redesign the firm is coordinating include Temple Tikvah, in New Hyde Park, L.I.; and B’nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The handful of congregations with which Landau Zinder is now working — and the several dozen congrgations of all denominations for which the partners have drawn up similar renovation plans — show that renovations on old buildings can trump construction of new ones, Zinder said. “A synagogue that wants to make significant changes can achieve this.”
Landau Zinder is among a handful of architectural firms in the United States whose full-time or part-time expertise is synagogues. All, Zinder and Landau said, deal with contemporary preferences and economic realities and evolving aesthetic preferences. Young Jews, whether in the city or suburb, favor less-conspicuous synagogue buildings than their parents and grandparents built. Small is the new big. They “don’t want to be seen from the street,” Zinder said. Young Jews, in either location, want synagogues that can serve as multi-purpose educational-and-social centers. And the synagogues of young Jews usually have limited financial resources.
“Young people don’t want their parents’ synagogue,” said Zinder, who was named Architect of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Architects last year.
“We have to design something that is economical,” Landau said. His goal: “Something that has a spiritual value, but has the ability to accommodate secular activities.”
The partners, who share a longstanding interest in designing synagogues, met at the Princeton Jewish Center, where they served on the congregation’s building committee. “I’ve seen the [building] process from the other side,” Zinder said.
Zinder and Landau “clearly use a postmodern approach with regard to design,” Preisler told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Many synagogue architects use elements from Eastern European wooden synagogues as well as incorporate elements evoking a modern Israeli style — large stone blocks, rows of upper windows. This firm seems to like a lot of natural light and worship spaces that can be multi-purpose.”
The Landau Zinder firm typically designs every facet of its synagogue projects, including a sanctuary’s bima table and Ner Tamid light. Said Landau: “It’s my contribution to Judaism.”
Jersey City, whose Jewish population had decreased from an estimated 13,000 60 years ago to 5,200 in 1980 but bounced back to a current 6,000, was once home to “dozens of shuls,” Rabbi Hachen said. “It was a very Jewish place.”
Now, most of the city’s synagogues have closed; only four remain.
In recent years, several young Jewish families have settled in Jersey City, attracted by its low housing costs, good public school system and convenient commute to jobs in New York City, the rabbi said. An increase in the synagogue’s membership to 250 family units in the next few years is realistic, she said. “It’s a growing urban area.”
The new members of Temple Beth-El include large numbers of attorneys, teachers and people in the real estate industry; there are few very wealthy people among them, Rabbi Hachen said.
So the congregation has instituted a “phased-in” five-year fundraising campaign, and established a non-profit corporation, The Friends of Temple Beth-El Jersey City.
Renovations will probably start sometime in 2016.
An architectural firm makes more money from constructing a new building than renovating an old one, Zinder said. But the spiritual needs of a site like Temple Beth-El — “It has a sense of history” — outweigh the bottom line, he said.
Zinder said he and Landau have no regrets about advising a congregation to renovate rather than rebuild. “For us it’s the right thing.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Jerusalem - Israel was caught this week between a fence and an embrace.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate - one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people - about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so. Read More
Is a fence the answer? An embrace?
Contributing Editor
Photo Galleria:
Jerusalem — Israel was caught this week between a fence and an embrace.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate — one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people — about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so.
In cafés and on Facebook, Israelis are arguing the pros and cons of admitting even a few hundred refugees.
Many cite security concerns, fearing that ISIS will hitch a ride into the Israeli heartland. Others insist that the only Jewish country in the world has an obligation to provide a home to the homeless. Still others say the government can’t even cope with the tens of thousands of African migrants and refugees already in the country, and that welcoming other asylum-seekers would further strain the country’s resources.
That Israel is technically at war with Syria hasn’t stopped the country’s liberals from bashing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Israel is too small a country to accept refugees from Syria, its most openly hostile neighbor.
Israel “is not indifferent to the human tragedy” of refugees, Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday, and noted that Israeli hospitals have treated about 1,000 injured Syrians. But “Israel is a very small state. It has no geographic depth or demographic depth,” the prime minister said, clearly alluding to the demographic threat an influx of Arab Muslim refugees would pose to Israel’s Jewish majority.
To drill the point home, Netanyahu then announced plans to begin construction of a new 18-mile stretch of fence along its border with Jordan, which has absorbed 750,000 Syrian refugees and another 50,000 from Iraq. Israel already has fences on its border with Syria on the Golan Heights, its border with Lebanon, its border with Gaza and much of the West Bank.
Israel’s recently completed 143-mile fence along the Egyptian border has all but stopped the influx of refugees from Africa, but tens of thousands remain in the country.
Within hours of Netanyahu’s remarks opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the prime minister lacked compassion.
“You’ve forgotten what it is to be Jewish,” Herzog wrote on his Facebook page. “The prime minister of the Jewish people doesn’t close his heart nor his borders when people are fleeing for their lives, with babies in their arms, from persecutors.”
While Herzog’s remarks went viral, they didn’t sway public opinion.
In a poll released by Channel 10 on Monday, just 11 percent of those polled want to see Israel welcoming the refugees while 80 percent do not.
In an ironic twist, an editorial in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper — which rooted for Herzog in this year’s elections — accused Herzog of hypocrisy.
“Opposition leader Isaac Herzog — whose Zionist Union faction opted to shut down the Knesset committee that dealt with the treatment of foreign workers and asylum seekers, claiming the issue wasn’t sufficiently important — said Israel should consider taking in Syrian refugees. But before Herzog volunteers to accept new refugees, he ought to explain why he hasn’t lifted a finger in years for the sake of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers already in Israel, who also fled out of fear of the acts of murder and terror taking place in their strife-riven countries.”
Other liberals saved their barbs for Netanyahu and his right-wing government.
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the leftist +972 magazine, told The Jewish Week that Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have taken in four million Syrian refugees, and that Israel has a moral obligation to pitch in.
“I don’t expect Israel to remotely match those figures — but none? Not one family? Not one orphan? This is a disgrace,” he said. “For a Jewish country that accuses the world of having ‘stood silent’ during the Holocaust, not to take in a single Syrian refugee? For a country that boasts of being an ‘island of democracy’ in a cruel region to be the one country on Syria’s borders that’s locked its doors? ‘Disgrace’ is a big understatement.”
Derfner said Israel should absorb “somewhere between 1,000 and a few thousand refugees” who could be housed around Israel in prefab caravans.
“Israel housed over 400,000 former Soviet immigrants who arrived in the early ’90s, so a few thousand Syrians shouldn’t be a problem. Their nationality is irrelevant — taking in [Syrian] Palestinians is no precedent for recognizing the Palestinian right of return, or for anything other than making a humanitarian gesture. But I must say that personally, I feel the worst about keeping out the Kurds, who are such brave, persecuted people, and such long-time allies of Israel.”
In contrast, Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, warned that taking in Syrian refugees, or permitting the Palestinian Authority to do so, could endanger Israel’s security.
“We don’t know what kind of political activity the refugees were involved in and some may be terrorists,” Inbar said. “As for the Palestinians taking in refugees, do we need more terrorists or hostile people in the Palestinian territories?”
Even if the refugees don’t pose a security risk to Israel, Inbar said, absorbing people from a country that “views Israel in terrible terms isn’t wise. It will be easier for them to be absorbed in an Arabic-speaking country with a similar mentality. I don’t see the Gulf states, which have the money, doing anything to accept refugees.”
Sarah Tuttle-Singer has heard all the arguments, for and against, and says she is prepared to house a refugee mom and a couple of kids in her tiny apartment on a moshav.
|“The kids and I barely close out our month above zero in the bank,” the single mother wrote in her popular Times of Israel blog. “We’ve had to borrow. There were two days two years ago where we ate a lot of Ramen, white bread, and chocolate spread.”
Last year, she said, she and her kids “lived in a glorified trailer. Our kitchen was as wide as my hips, and we had one bed for the three of us. But this year we have bedrooms and a porch and enough space for dance parties.
“So, yes, Bibi and all who say there is no room: if you let in a few thousand refugees? This mother and her two children will take in another mother and her two children for as long as they need. A refugee camp is no place for a mother and her children — I know this from having spent three long weeks without a stable place to sleep with my two children. So let them in — just a few thousand — let in the children, let in their mothers. And let families like mine do the right thing.”
Reform Machzor Enlarges The Tent
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda - no, this isn't a syllabus for a college lit course; it's a sampling from the new Reform High Holidays prayer book.
Those were the two poles in a spirited and emotional debate — one with deep historical echoes, given the history of the Jewish people — about whether the government should take in Syrian refugees or at least enable the Palestinian Authority to do so.
In cafés and on Facebook, Israelis are arguing the pros and cons of admitting even a few hundred refugees.
Many cite security concerns, fearing that ISIS will hitch a ride into the Israeli heartland. Others insist that the only Jewish country in the world has an obligation to provide a home to the homeless. Still others say the government can’t even cope with the tens of thousands of African migrants and refugees already in the country, and that welcoming other asylum-seekers would further strain the country’s resources.
That Israel is technically at war with Syria hasn’t stopped the country’s liberals from bashing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Israel is too small a country to accept refugees from Syria, its most openly hostile neighbor.
Israel “is not indifferent to the human tragedy” of refugees, Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday, and noted that Israeli hospitals have treated about 1,000 injured Syrians. But “Israel is a very small state. It has no geographic depth or demographic depth,” the prime minister said, clearly alluding to the demographic threat an influx of Arab Muslim refugees would pose to Israel’s Jewish majority.
To drill the point home, Netanyahu then announced plans to begin construction of a new 18-mile stretch of fence along its border with Jordan, which has absorbed 750,000 Syrian refugees and another 50,000 from Iraq. Israel already has fences on its border with Syria on the Golan Heights, its border with Lebanon, its border with Gaza and much of the West Bank.
Israel’s recently completed 143-mile fence along the Egyptian border has all but stopped the influx of refugees from Africa, but tens of thousands remain in the country.
Within hours of Netanyahu’s remarks opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the prime minister lacked compassion.
“You’ve forgotten what it is to be Jewish,” Herzog wrote on his Facebook page. “The prime minister of the Jewish people doesn’t close his heart nor his borders when people are fleeing for their lives, with babies in their arms, from persecutors.”
While Herzog’s remarks went viral, they didn’t sway public opinion.
In a poll released by Channel 10 on Monday, just 11 percent of those polled want to see Israel welcoming the refugees while 80 percent do not.
In an ironic twist, an editorial in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper — which rooted for Herzog in this year’s elections — accused Herzog of hypocrisy.
“Opposition leader Isaac Herzog — whose Zionist Union faction opted to shut down the Knesset committee that dealt with the treatment of foreign workers and asylum seekers, claiming the issue wasn’t sufficiently important — said Israel should consider taking in Syrian refugees. But before Herzog volunteers to accept new refugees, he ought to explain why he hasn’t lifted a finger in years for the sake of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers already in Israel, who also fled out of fear of the acts of murder and terror taking place in their strife-riven countries.”
Other liberals saved their barbs for Netanyahu and his right-wing government.
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the leftist +972 magazine, told The Jewish Week that Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have taken in four million Syrian refugees, and that Israel has a moral obligation to pitch in.
“I don’t expect Israel to remotely match those figures — but none? Not one family? Not one orphan? This is a disgrace,” he said. “For a Jewish country that accuses the world of having ‘stood silent’ during the Holocaust, not to take in a single Syrian refugee? For a country that boasts of being an ‘island of democracy’ in a cruel region to be the one country on Syria’s borders that’s locked its doors? ‘Disgrace’ is a big understatement.”
Derfner said Israel should absorb “somewhere between 1,000 and a few thousand refugees” who could be housed around Israel in prefab caravans.
“Israel housed over 400,000 former Soviet immigrants who arrived in the early ’90s, so a few thousand Syrians shouldn’t be a problem. Their nationality is irrelevant — taking in [Syrian] Palestinians is no precedent for recognizing the Palestinian right of return, or for anything other than making a humanitarian gesture. But I must say that personally, I feel the worst about keeping out the Kurds, who are such brave, persecuted people, and such long-time allies of Israel.”
In contrast, Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, warned that taking in Syrian refugees, or permitting the Palestinian Authority to do so, could endanger Israel’s security.
“We don’t know what kind of political activity the refugees were involved in and some may be terrorists,” Inbar said. “As for the Palestinians taking in refugees, do we need more terrorists or hostile people in the Palestinian territories?”
Even if the refugees don’t pose a security risk to Israel, Inbar said, absorbing people from a country that “views Israel in terrible terms isn’t wise. It will be easier for them to be absorbed in an Arabic-speaking country with a similar mentality. I don’t see the Gulf states, which have the money, doing anything to accept refugees.”
Sarah Tuttle-Singer has heard all the arguments, for and against, and says she is prepared to house a refugee mom and a couple of kids in her tiny apartment on a moshav.
|“The kids and I barely close out our month above zero in the bank,” the single mother wrote in her popular Times of Israel blog. “We’ve had to borrow. There were two days two years ago where we ate a lot of Ramen, white bread, and chocolate spread.”
Last year, she said, she and her kids “lived in a glorified trailer. Our kitchen was as wide as my hips, and we had one bed for the three of us. But this year we have bedrooms and a porch and enough space for dance parties.
“So, yes, Bibi and all who say there is no room: if you let in a few thousand refugees? This mother and her two children will take in another mother and her two children for as long as they need. A refugee camp is no place for a mother and her children — I know this from having spent three long weeks without a stable place to sleep with my two children. So let them in — just a few thousand — let in the children, let in their mothers. And let families like mine do the right thing.”
Reform Machzor Enlarges The Tent
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda - no, this isn't a syllabus for a college lit course; it's a sampling from the new Reform High Holidays prayer book.
In the Beginning
Reform Machzor Enlarges The Tent
Staff Writer
Photo Galleria:
Rabbi Deborah Hirsch
Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda — no, this isn’t a syllabus for a college lit course; it’s a sampling from the new Reform High Holidays prayer book.
Next week, Reform shul-goers will be spared the humdrum of conventional services with a newly revamped machzor, equipped with poetry, feminist and LGBTQ-friendly prayers and 11 woodcut prints inspired by the holiday themes. The edition, published in March and being put to use for the first time next week, is the first new prayer book to be penned by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the umbrella group for North American Reform rabbis, since 1978. Three hundred synagogues have pre-ordered the book.
“It’s definitely an upgrade,” said Rabbi Deborah Hirsch, interim senior rabbi at Temple Shaaray Tefila, a large Reform congregation on the Upper East Side. “It gets personal in a whole new way.”
The new installment, which makes a special effort to include Jews with disabilities and Jews of color, comes as studies point to an alarming drop in synagogue attendance among young Jews. A March 2014 Pew Research Center study found that millennials are increasingly unmoored from religious institutions; it came on the heels of its 2013 “Portrait of American Jews,” which found that 32 percent of young Jews define themselves as having no religion.
Rabbi Hirsch’s congregation was one of the few to pilot the machzor for the past two High Holiday seasons. Results have not disappointed. Attendance has risen, and congregants are increasingly engaged in the services, she said.
“We need a liturgy that gives people permission to be honest about serious questions and doubts,” said Rabbi Hirsch. The new machzor “allows people whose faith is not as grounded as they would hope” to feel welcome and included in the services, she said.
She gave one example of a section before the Mourners’ Kaddish that discusses how to recite the prayer for a parent who was emotionally or physically harmful or for someone who died from violence. “The text doesn’t hide from these painful tensions.”
Still, though Reform rabbis excitedly usher in the new prayer book, hoping to up engagement, not everyone seems sanguine. Jewish World Review, a right-leaning webzine published by Binyamin Jolkovsky, went so far as to promise free High Holiday tickets to those who “feel uncomfortable for ANY reason” in their synagogues. The note, presumably referring to the new Reform prayer book and its inclusiveness, was placed atop a JTA story about it reprinted on the JWR site.
Rabbi Hirsch, in response, said that some are “uncomfortable” with the idea of “embracing Jews who have not traditionally been embraced.”
In an effort to be more inclusive of women and LGBTQ Jews, the machzor intermittently refers to God as a woman and in one passage substitutes the words “bride” and “groom” with the gender-neutral “couple.” In a blessing that calls congregants to the Torah, mention of gender is left out as a gesture to transgender people.
But the true outsiders being embraced for the first time? Canadians, Rabbi Hirsh joked. “He [Jolkovsky] is probably just upset that we included a prayer for Canada.”
New York, New York 10036 United States
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