In a surprisingly caustic Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Dovid Margolin, a senior editor at the Hasidic magazine Chabad.org, warned of a major new threat to his community’s vast network of schools, known as yeshivas. “New York’s yeshivas face a challenge with echoes of ancient persecution,” he wrote, comparing it to the shuttering of Jewish cheder schools in the Soviet Union a century ago.
He wasn’t alone in sounding the alarm. “This war on Orthodox Jews’ religious educational underpinnings,” wrote Eli Steinberg in the Daily Wire, “is as much an existential threat as the madmen who storm their grocery stores with guns and rush their homes with machetes.”
Margolin and Steinberg aren’t talking about violence or state-sponsored persecution, however. The looming horror they describe is nothing more than a set of proposals the state Board of Regents is considering to help these schools provide children a basic education.
Upwards of 65,000 Hasidic children statewide do not receive the education they deserve. Most of them are boys attending yeshivas whose language of instruction is Yiddish: Children are not even taught to read and write in English. Similar neglect is found in math, science and other key subjects.
The lack of a basic secular education contributes to a cycle of poverty that prevails across the Hasidic community — one that will only get worse as its population grows.
Such schools are not simply neglectful: They fail to meet New York’s legal requirements for education.
