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| R' Aharon Teitelbaum, Satmar Rebbe of Kiyas Joel (Jerusalem Post) |
Rather than paraphrasing, I am going to do some heavy excerpting. A lot of what he says mirrors what I have said. It is just too bad that so many Orthodox rabbinic and lay leaders haven’t said the same thing in their critique of the Times. Although if one reads between the lines, in some cases they do. But it goes virtually unnoticed because of their primary focus on the antisemitism they attempt to show is behind the now infamous New York Times article on the subject.
As I have said more than once, I think their accusations in this regard have merit. But as I also indicated, their focus on attacking the Times misses the more important point about how seriously short changed their students are by their lack of learning even such basic skill as speaking and writing the English language fluently.
First, the politically conservative Aronson has no mercy on the Times long history of having a ‘Jewish problem’:
The way to fix well-funded, failing schools is more funding––unless the schools are privately run. Welfare dependency isn’t lamentable––unless the dependents belong to religious sects. Standardized tests are bigoted and tell us nothing about minority achievement––unless the minority is pious and speaks Yiddish.
For many readers, such left-wing hypocrisy explains the New York Times’s recent report that New York’s Hasidic schools (which educate thousands of children and take millions in public money) produce alumni with dreadful command of English, social studies, mathematics, and science. These readers argue that the article was a double-spread fusillade in the Times’s hundred-year war against Jewish particularism...
Agreed. But here is the money quote:
But what matters right now––if the Times story is correct, which I’ll assume it basically is––is that numerous Jewish children are not getting educated in the language, history, and civics of the country of which they are citizens.
Aronson goes on to say:
The stats are astonishing. “Only nine schools [in New York] had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level” in 2019, the Times reports. All were Hasidic boys schools. Hasidic girls schools did better, with an 80 percent fail rate. That’s worse––far worse––than public schools with high numbers of poor children, to say nothing of non-Hasidic Jewish schools and of private schools in general. Teachers in boys schools testify that most of their students can’t speak and read and write English fluently. At many boys schools, secular studies pretty much stop after bar mitzvah age––thirteen.
These failures don’t seem explicable as isolated cases of negligence. Rather, whole schools knowingly produce alumni unequipped for American life. Indeed, in 2018, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, a Satmar Hasidic leader (Satmar is one of the largest and most reclusive sects), proudly declared in Yiddish that Satmar schools taught virtually no secular subjects and that Satmar would refuse to comply with state education laws and commissions.
This is exactly right. It pains me that not a word about this terrible situation was mentioned by any of their many defenders. Instead – they just extolled the virtues of this community while criticizing the Times article as an anti Chasidic hit piece for ignoring them.
It could very well be that there is more than a grain of truth about the bias of the 2 Jewish investigative reporters that investigated and reported this story. It wouldn’t be the first time fully assimilated Jews looked down at fervently religious Jews that refused to fully assimilate like they did.
Another thing worth mentioning again is the pushback by defenders against the Times insinuation that these Chasidic schools were essentially stealing government funds from the poorer communities that needed them. They explained that those funds were minuscule compared to what public schools get. And in any case they were given for purposes other than education - like COVID relief for example. They accused the Times of purposely leaving out those pertinent facts to exacerbate the anti Chasidic enmity their article would generate.
While there might be some truth to those accusations, the point is that if these schools were receiving funds based on their status of a school in compliance with state educational guidelines. But that was the furthest thing from truth. Purposely so, That they studiously and surreptitiously ignored those guidelines should have disqualified any money earmarked for a school. Even if it had nothing to do with education.
Again, as I have repeatedly indicated - just because you don’t like the messenger – and even believe they are prejudiced, doesn’t mean the message is untrue. It is with this in mind that I will end with one more excellent point made by Aronson. With which I entirely agree:
This is not good for the Jews. For an immigrant to struggle with English is one thing, and I am proud to know plenty who have done so. But many Hasidic communities raise American children in Yiddish while not fluently teaching them the language of their country. This is to deny children full participation in American public life and access to many great American institutions––of education, culture, finance, law, media. To not teach proper civics and American history is to promote ingratitude for this country’s many blessings, and to neglect a duty all Americans share to pass on those blessings from generation to generation. Which is bad enough, but the Hasidim have the chutzpah to fund this unpatriotic way of teaching with hundreds of millions of dollars in public money.