Can we sleep at night when hundreds of girls are embarrassed and hurting?

This is addressed to all who concerned for the kavod and hearts of bnos Yisrael.

Please forgive the tone and harshness of my words in advance. My heart cannot rest and my tears cannot be suppressed. These words carry a truth that needs to be said, and I have to believe that we all know it.

A week ago, on the 2nd of Adar, the responses went out from seminaries to their applicants — acceptances, non-acceptances, and pending decisions. This past Thursday night, every girl had to have her response and deposit back to her seminary of choice. This past week saw the girls who’d been accepted in more than one school having to choose where they would go, while the girls on the pending lists were stuck waiting to see if slots would open for them.

For hundreds of bnos Yisrael holding pending letters, last week was very difficult. Some rode emotional roller coasters through hope and hopelessness; other saw a year of hopes shattered. It all could have been avoided with a small effort from all of us.

Enough is enough! We are hurting people who do not need to be hurt! All of us, high schools and seminaries alike, exist for our talmidos, bnos Yisrael yekaros v’chashuvos. It was never about us and our schools, and it is not allowed to be.

If we have an ounce of real yiras Shamayim, we will sit together and find a way to make this process more humane and honorable. Can we really sleep at night when so many people are thinking we’ve turned chinuch habanos into a business in which the girls are the sechorah? Can we sleep at night when hundreds of girls are embarrassed and hurting?

The present system, through which 1,200 girls are holding two or three acceptance letters, means that 500 girls are on waiting lists. Many of those girls might be on two or three waiting lists. Such a painful experience — and so unnecessary. Every girl should get into one school, and everyone at the same time. The haggling, the minds changing at the last minute because a friend decided to go somewhere else, the pressure to give a yes to a second choice because a student doesn’t yet have the answer from her first choice — this must all be eradicated.

We at the seminaries cannot allow our negios and our “need” to get the “best girls” for our self-serving ulterior motives destroy the trust and belief of bnos Yisrael. These are the very girls we are trying to teach emes, emunah, integrity, middos tovos, and yiras Shamayim!

We hit upon a solution that mimics the present process almost exactly, except a computer program accomplishes in one minute what we do in a week or two: leaving every girl with one acceptance only. It is similar to the system employed by residency training programs at teaching hospitals in the US, called the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP).

Essentially, two databases are created: the seminaries’ list of preferred students, and the students’ list of their preferred seminaries. A computer program then simultaneously scans the two databases and runs a multi-stage algorithm that ultimately matches all the seminaries and all the students. The NRMP has been running this way for seven decades, with gradual refinements.

While this idea will not establish new schools to make sure that every single girl has a place, it can at least provide a more humane and sensitive process for the existing inventory of spaces.

B’ezras Hashem, I will be sending this to all the schools and presenting it to the general public, in this publication and in others as well. I am willing to facilitate the setup of this program, with everything it entails at the technical and operational level, together with the seminary and high school vaad. I hope this can be the start of a collaborative and cooperative process among all the high schools and seminaries to reach a solution for the collective good.

The time has come to teach our students and children that we care about them and are willing to do whatever is possible to help, however we can.

Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald is the dean of Me'ohr Bais Yaakov Teachers' Seminary, which he founded in Jerusalem in 1999. A world-renowned educator and lecturer, he is also the author of Preparing Your Child for Success (ArtScroll/Mesorah).

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1053)