Between melting pot pressure and Board of Ed rules, could early American yeshivos stand a chance?

Photo: Elbud

A group of New York yeshivos hope to open a new front in their battle with the State Education Department — in Washington, D.C. The yeshivos are asking the federal government to address what they claim is a discriminatory campaign by New York authorities to alter and secularize their institutions. The timing would seem to be opportune, with a new and possibly more sympathetic administration taking office.

In the complaint, filed with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the yeshivos of Bobov, Satmar, Lubavitch’s Ohelei Torah, and Tzelem’s Arugas Habosem allege they are being denied the cultural flexibility that New York state has gone out of its way to foster in its own public schools. Likewise, the yeshivos argue that officials of the State Education Department (NYSED) are holding them to standards beyond what is required by law, betraying a motive other than ensuring compliance with educational requirements.

“New York’s actions seem calculated to make it too difficult for the yeshivos to fulfill their educational missions and to sustain their heritage,” reads the complaint authored by attorney Avi Schick, longtime leader of the yeshivos’ legal battle. “But New York is badly mistaken if it thinks complainants will cave to the pressure and standardize and secularize their schools.”

Mind the “Gap”

Traditional Jewish schooling in New York has been in an unwanted spotlight since around a decade ago, when a small coalition of anti-Orthodox activists and progressive journalists commandeered attention from the New York Times and other mainstream media to argue that yeshivos were failing to prepare their students for the contemporary workplace and public sphere. These activists accused New York of neglecting its legal obligations to ensure these schools were providing education “substantially equivalent” to that provided by their public counterparts.

This public pressure campaign eventually impelled New York state to more clearly define what it requires from private schools and to develop a system of oversight. In 2022, after several years of legal and political resistance from yeshivah advocates and some others in the non-public school community, the state ratified a set of standards and began enforcement.

Those regulations remain the subject of active litigation, yet the present complaint does not challenge them, arguing rather that yeshivos have become the target of a discriminatory campaign by the city of New York, which is largely charged with their oversight.

“The crux of the complaint is that there is a gap between what the standards require and the extent to which government officials have tried to intervene in the internal programs of yeshivos,” said Professor Michael Avi Helfand, chair in law and religion at Pepperdine Law School. “The allegation is that since this has been experienced by a number of New York Jewish institutions, what accounts for that gap is that they are being treated more skeptically by government officials.”

The complaint charges New York with violating the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, prohibiting any entity that receives federal funds from engaging in discriminatory behavior against a specific group.

“If the allegations in this complaint are borne out in an investigation, to my mind that would raise serious Title VI issues,” said Professor Helfand. “Government has not only the authority but the responsibility to ensure that children in its jurisdiction receive a basic education that prepares them to be self-sufficient and civically engaged. When it moves beyond those compelling government interests, its authority to impose on the rights of parents to control the upbringing of their children begins to wane.”

Running Afoul of Title VI?

The complaint’s timing is potentially auspicious, in that the decision about whether the yeshivos’ allegations should be investigated will be made by the Trump administration’s yet-to-be named chief of the Education Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The incoming administration expressed a desire to accelerate the investigations into the cases of campus anti-Semitism, which falls under the same Title VI rubric,” said Professor Helfand. “That leads one to think there might be some momentum to follow up on these types of complaints.”

There is presently a significant backlog of Title VI complaints at the DOE and it is not clear when or if the yeshivos’ claims will be addressed.

Wielding the cudgel of federal funding, the DOE can force states and municipalities to enter into negotiations with the aggrieved parties and to seek settlements, adopting reforms and pledging to change modes of behavior.

Selective Openness

At the center of the complaint is NYSED’s firm refusal to consider lessons in Chumash, Gemara, or other religious texts as fulfilling any part of the school’s obligation to provide “substantially equivalent” education.

The yeshivos argue that this approach is “discriminatory,” in light of a 2018 public school policy encouraging curricula that promote “cultures, languages, and ways of knowing that have been devalued, suppressed” by “forms of oppression.” One example of that framework was a history program framing “Black Studies as the Study of the World,” for pre-K through 12th-grade students.

The complaint also argues that the city’s refusal to consider classes taught in Yiddish or texts studied in Hebrew or Aramaic is incongruous with policies governing over 200 public school dual-language programs. These programs are not geared for students from immigrant backgrounds, but rather for American-born ones immersing themselves in a foreign language by taking up to 90 percent of their classes in it.

The complaint quotes a 2023 statement by NYSED official David Frank that the English-only requirement “is one difference between the substantial equivalence regulations and what happens in district [public] schools” and non-public ones.

A particularly concerning exchange occurred when Robin Singer, the New York City Department of Education’s deputy counsel for compliance and operations, insisted that Arugas Habosem share its reading list with her office. When challenged that the city should not have approval rights over any book list, Singer responded that her goal was to see that students were “exposed to a range of materials that their parents and schools wouldn’t otherwise permit them to read.”

The complaint calls the city’s “interest in dictating what yeshivah students read” a “thinly veiled attempt to paternalistically force its secular views into yeshivah education.”

The complaint also raises issues over state overreach into yeshivos’ hiring processes and a refusal to send male-only teams of observers to older grades of boys’ schools.

“We’ve had enough interaction to say that there is a lack a respect for Jewish culture, tradition, and education,” said Mr. Schick. “Their mindset is that the highest form of achievement is to leave the community you grew up in and go off to an Ivy League college. That’s not our goal or our measure of success. The longer this has gone on, the clearer it becomes that their goal is to standardize us and secularize our schools. And to get there, they are discriminating against us.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1046)