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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.

The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.

Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.

Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods

This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.

I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English

There may be something here, but let's frame this in comparative terms. How is this different from regular public schools? And do the educational outcomes at the end of this produce bad societal results? For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?

I suppose that could depend on what you consider a "bad societal result" but I would say yes, definitely.

There is a lot welfare usage and active abuse, like the comment you replied to mentions in the bottom. There probably isn't a lot of "public" violent crime like gang murders (although I did find a report of a dynastic struggle in Jerusalem that lead to street brawls). However, I expect there's quite a lot of abuse that goes unreported and/or unresolved because, like with most cults, any such problems are swept under the rug or "handled" internally and victims (especially young or female victims, or victims of anyone with social power) are expected to not make waves for the sake of community cohesion. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism#Controversies or search Google for something like "Hasidim and domestic violence."

In addition, members are typically made completely dependent on the community, and made to believe that any contact with people outside the community will make them unclean (like with the Roma or FLDS) so any violations of norms can be punished with shunning which is obviously legal but devastating. As with these others groups, even members who would like to leave may struggle to do so because they have no relevant skills, poor English, no outside family or friends, etc.

There presumably is a lot of indoctrination into a very regressive religious world view (what else are they going to do in a religious school that doesn't teach basic English) which leads to conflicts with the outside world, such as Hasidic men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes.

One could argue that, given how academically inclined Jews typically are, a failure to teach basic English and Math is much more damning of the Yeshivas than of urban public schools.

Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I can't imagine how that's a reasonable reply to what I wrote.

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