Lakewood, New Jersey, the home of the famous Lakewood Yeshiva, is inundated with haredi beggars. So Lakewood's haredi community regulates them. Here's how it does it, courtesy of the New York Times.
The New York Times Magazine has a long article by Mark Oppenheimer on charity collectors in the heavily haredi town of Lakewood, New Jersey, home to the largest haredi yeshiva in the US, Beth Medrash Govoha (better known as Lakewood Yeshiva).
The article doesn't mention any of Lakewood's haredi crime or any abuses in its system of approving charity collectors, although such abuses are said to exist.
Oppenheimer writes that "the growing Orthodox movement encourages young men to forgo or postpone higher education for religious study, and [Lakewood Yeshiva] has benefited from that."
The fact is that Lakewood's founder, Aharon Kotler, created this concept of no work all study in the 1940s. It grew from a small number of such all-study haredi yeshiva students to thousands who do not work, even late into middle age.
That all-study concept worked as long as there were enough working haredim to support those who studied full time.
But by the 1990s, the number of poverty stricken haredim began to increase exponentially.
This poverty forced haredi leaders to manipulate the political process to get government funds their institutions really didn't qualify for, and it led directly to the Pell Grant scandal and other scams that landed haredim in prison.
In Israel, a similar all-study, no work theology grew up at roughly the same time. It also led to a series of haredi crimes and scamming the government.
And in both cases, lots of haredim live in poverty because of that all-study, no work theology.
But when Oppenheimer writes about the theology that encourages Jews to "forgo or postpone higher education for religious study," he misses the broader and more important point.
Many haredi grade schools, middle schools and high schools – even in the US and Europe – teach little or no secular studies. Students are not taught science or math or English or Modern Hebrew or civics or world history or American history or Israel's history or computers or computer science. And this means that when they turn eighteen, they have almost no chance of getting a higher education even if they want one, because they have a secular educational level of third or fourth graders.
Oppenheimer reports that a Lakewood va'ad, Tomchei Tzedakah, screens beggars and charity collectors and issues the ones they find to be kosher a letter allowing them to beg in local synagogues and yeshivas (with some restrictions). That va'ad was formed, Oppenheimer reports, eight years ago because of questionable or outright fraudulent collectors who had besieged Lakewood from across the world to collect money for causes that were likely frauds.
And while this is certainly true, the fact is that so many more haredim needed to beg to survive, that reducing the and regulating them became necessary.
Yes, Lakewood's haredi community regulates its beggars. So do communities in Long Island and Queens and other places. And almost everywhere there is regulation, legitimate poor people are excluded because they aren't Orthodox enough or haredi enough or belong to the wrong sect or hasidic movement – or, most often, don't belong to a hasidic movement and are trying to beg at a some hasidic synagogues in Brooklyn.
And although FailedMessiah.com has reported it, that is a story that has yet to be widely told. But it should be.