YAFFED's controversial billboard on a Flushing Avenue building – it's first ad posted in a haredi neighborhood – in this case, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – rather than on a large public road on the outskirts – shows a young boy learning in a yeshiva in 1988, disgustedly saying in Yiddish that “English is profane.” Today, the boy, now a man, says in the next panel, "Oy, what was I thinking?" as he sits over a pile of unpaid bills. Its previous billboard posted on the Prospect Expressway angered haredim, in part because it was airing the haredi community's dirty laundry in public.
The New York Post reports:
…Young Advocates for Fair Education’s controversial cartoon on a Flushing Avenue building [ – it's first ad posted in a haredi neighborhood, in this case Williamsburg, rather than on a large public road on the outskirts – ] shows a young boy learning in a yeshiva in 1988, disgustedly saying in Yiddish that “English is profane.”
The next panel shows him as an older man wrestling with a mountain of unpaid bills — presumably because the shoddy schooling he received as a lad prevented him from making enough dough as an adult.
“Oy, what was I thinking?” he kvetches.
At issue is the education that kids receive in some of the city’s 250 Jewish private schools, particularly in ultra-Orthodox enclaves such as Williamsburg and Borough Park, where Yiddish is considered the primary language and English classes end for boys at age 13.
“Most of them provide maybe 1.5 hours of English and math at the end of an already tiring day, taught by nonprofessionals,” said Young Advocates founder Naftuli Moster.
“They are just a mess when it comes to providing a proper education,” added Moster, 28, who is working on a master’s degree in social work and is a former member of the Belz Hasidic sect.…
When one went up along the Prospect Expressway near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in 2013, members of the insular Orthodox community were outraged because it aired the community’s dirty laundry to a wider audience.
“So this has to be done from the inside,” explained Moster, who promised more billboards in Williamsburg soon.…
The city Department of Education said that while the state sets the standards, district superintendents do have the authority to assess yeshivas.
But without a specific issue, “it’s neither reasonable nor appropriate” for superintendents to visit every nonpublic school in their district, a spokesman said.
Read it all here.
That New York City's Department of Education claims there is no specific "issue" is false. The city knows about many specific issues – including haredi schools like Chabad's Oholei Torah that do not teach any secular subjects at all – but just like New York State, the city has chosen to do nothing about them.
This is a case of politicians like New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio selling out to the haredi voting blocs and sacrificing the future of many haredi children as a result. But like with metzitzah b'beh (MBP, the direct mouth-to-bleeding-penis sucking done by haredi mohels after cutting of the baby's foreskin), de Blasio has so far openly chosen to put children at risk and even sacrifice a few of them in order to get and keep the support of those haredi voting blocs. And that speaks volumes about how little New Yorks so often corrupt political class values the lives of people who can't vote for them due to age or infirmity.
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[Hat Tip: The Lion.]