“We wrote to the governor, the attorney general, the mayor and the chancellor. I do that periodically…and this is the first time I’ve never gotten a single response."
As FailedMessiah.com has reported for years, many hasidic yeshivas teach secular subjects (almost always with unqualified teachers teaching them) for at most 90 minutes each day until children reach 13-years-old, at which point many hasidic yeshivas completely stop teaching students secular subjects.
This is illegal almost everywhere, including New York State. But New York State, New York City and counties like Rockland where high numbers of haredim live refuse to enforce the law and thereby become complicit in what is essentially a form of child abuse.
Now New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio – two men who never met a hasidic community they wouldn't pander to – and other state, county and city officials have doubled down on their negligence and reached a new low by refusing to even answer a letter written by noted civil rights attorney Norman Siegel for Naftali Moster's Yaffed (Young Advocates For Fair Education) organization.
The Jewish Week reports:
…In a Dec. 8 letter veteran civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, writing on behalf of the nonprofit Yaffed, asked officials to investigate complaints of charedi and black-hat yeshivas providing boys with barely any secular education.
“We wrote to the governor, the attorney general, the mayor and the chancellor. I do that periodically…and this is the first time I’ve never gotten a single response,” said Siegel, who was director of the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 through 2000.
State officials didn’t respond to multiple emails from The Jewish Week asking for comment. Department of Education officials reiterated what they told The Jewish Week in December: that they needed complaints about a specific school before they could investigate. They didn’t address why they haven’t responded to Siegel’s request for a meeting, or respond to a question as to whether they would investigate should Siegal name specific schools, something Siegel said he expected to do at a meeting, but didn’t want to broadcast in a public letter.
“The only thing I can conclude at this point is that this is a radioactive issue” he said, that “none of them necessarily wants to touch.”
“It’s known that this is a community that very often votes monolithically,” he said. “All this just gets me very angry, because that’s not the way it should be. It should be that elected officials look at these issues on the merits and if there’s a problem here they should do something. They’re legally obligated to do something. Then you have to figure out how to hold them accountable.”…While Yaffed awaits a response from the government, it is looking for parents of current students and current teachers to serve as plaintiffs for the lawsuit — not a small order in the insular charedi communities of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park where doing so could lead to retaliation or social ostracism.…
Read it all here.
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