For the second time in 10 days, a Yeshiva in Lakewood made a decision not to reopen on the opening day of school.
Yeshivah Keter Torah, an Sefardic elementary school, has announced late last night that they will not be reopening today as scheduled, due to financial difficulties. The sudden closure of the Yeshiva leaves approximately 150 children displaced.
The Yeshivah, under the leadership of Rabbi Dabbah Shlita, notified their Rabbeim late last night, that the school will not be reopening this school year.
Just more than a week ago, YWN reported the closure of Yeshiva Bais Hatorah on the opening day of school. That school closure has left 400 children without a school.
(Chaim Schapiro – YWN / TLS)
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27 Responses
Recessions are like that.
and Lakewood is especially vulnerable since they have a relatively small percentage of “Baal ha-Bassim” relative to people who are professional Bnei Torah (i.e. too many low income people relative to the number of high income people). The solution is to encourage frum business to move to Lakewood, or to encourage frum commuters to live in Lakewood and commute to jobs elsewhere.
Unfortunately, there are more yeshivahs with the same problem. Brooklyn Yeshivahs haven’t started to open yet.
Bus the kids to Brooklyn. Sounds crazy but the yeshivos in Bklyn have the infratructure in place & have room to absorb 600 kids between all the yeshivos.
akuperma says: …”The solution is to encourage frum business to move to Lakewood, or to encourage frum commuters to live in Lakewood and commute to jobs elsewhere.”
Perhaps the solution might be for us to go back to the old ways of the previous generation when people WORKED and LEARNED. The gedolim of yesteryear all had professions i.e., manual labor, grocery stores, physicians. The system is imploding. There is not enough money to support such a large contingent of people who don’t work!
Since we can’t have an Honest debate about the “Kollel” System that has drained our resources and malfunctioned, we also can’t talk about the Gezel in tuition for Seminaries, we also can’t talk about that HUD, FOOD STAMPS and every Government Program is keeping this City and BMG afloat while many folks using the system should NOT be learning, Whoops! can’t say that either. Skip all the reality and blame Yeshiva and Schools closing on OBAMA!!! HA! HA! HA!
Mazal77: “Unfortunately, there are more yeshivahs with the same problem. Brooklyn Yeshivahs haven’t started to open yet”.
They aren’t scheduled to yet.
What is different in Lakewood is that EVERYBODY pays tuition! If Yeshivos would give huge discounts to “klei kodesh”, NOBODY would be paying tuition and we would be hearing about many more closings. Maybe it is not enough to cover the nice (not extravagant) buildings. Maybe parents no longer have the time or sensitivity, as our parents did, to volunteer serving lunches, driving on trips, stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, organizing bazaars, bake sales, etc. All of this would relieve a huge part of the financial burden in these places. I was involved in two Mesivtos (once as a student and once as part of the administration) where the students, you read right, the students, washed dishes, mopped and waxed floors, and even cleaned bathrooms. The savings must have been tremendous, and the lessons learned even greater. It’s NOT all coming to us. It takes effort and a sense of gratitude from the parents and from the students as they get older. Something to think about.
And how about actually doing something about our ridiculously high standard of living. When that little voice inside of us says “I have to buy that, everyone else does.” or “What will so and so think if I’m wearing this or driving that?” then we have to make a conscious effort to hold back just a little bit. Just little at a time done consistently, and we will all come very far.
And how about actually doing something about our ridiculously high standard of living. It hurts all of us. When that little voice inside of us says “I have to buy that, everyone else does.” or “What will so and so think if I’m wearing this or driving that?” then we have to make a conscious effort to hold back just a little bit. Just little at a time done consistently, and we will all come very far.
#4- There are plenty of people who work in the frum community. The unique problem with Lakewood is the rabbanim wanted to “get away from it all” and founded a community in which you have an extremely high percentage of full time Bnei Torah (students or teachers). All schools are largely dependent on the Baal ha-bassim to pay the bills, and Lakewood has a shortage of Baal ha-bassim.
Ever sit and wonder WHY this is happening in Lakewood? I could’ve told ya so 10 years ago….Everyone was living on PHD’s back then so it was all good – and today, P does not HD any more. Uh-oh!!! now what are we gonna do??? Help….
But what about these kinderlach?? I know, let ’em hang out on street corners!! Hmmmm, do I hear “at risk” mentioned here??
This is not exclusive to Lakewood. A local Brooklyn based Bais Yaakov just closed up over the summer as well, leaving many girls without a school….and no schools want to take them!
Unfortunately many yeshivos of all levels are being run as businesses.In order for a Rebbe,Magid Shiur, or R”M to be employed he needs a backing. The backing means his shver(father-in-law) or father pays the bosses of the institution to hire and pay their son or son-in-law.
In addition the institution will request a donation too.
Many of these baalei baatim are unable to support this idea whether because of failure of business or because their family member does not want to be a shmate or the one supporting does not want to be a puppet of an institution that is supposed to be a Makom Torah and ends up as a business. Rememeber the words of the Mishnah,”Kol Kneisia shehi lishem Shomayim Sofah Lehiskayem V’sheayn lishem Shomayim aino sofah lehiskayem”-if the goal of a Makom Torah is really to spread Torah it will last and if not, it will not last-it will cease to exist.
We were in a similar institution and the Rosh Yeshiva openly says i’m here to run a business. He has developed a good name and charges parents double of what other same level yeshivos are charging. The word is starting to leak out and several parents are quite disappointed about the phisophy. So when people will hear that this Yeshiva closed and others will feel sorry, the people who know the underlying facts should just keep quiet.
To number one, whose solution is for more working baale batim to move to Lakewood..
Part of the problem is that the Lakewood establishment does not want them, and actually use the school system to make it difficult if not impossible for working people to move there.
This has slowly started to change in recent years but there are certainly still vestiges..
I know a number of people who learned in kolel in Lakewood, went to work and remained in Lakewood and were treated as second class citizens there. They subsequently moved to other communitys such as Monsey and are much much happier…
An alternative solution is to legislate a school voucher system. The New Jersey Agudath Israel branch is trying to do just that. Frum NJ residents should all support that effort and vote for like-minded candidates. Governor Christie favors the idea.
The financial burden of paying astronomically-high taxes to support the public schools as well as paying ever-increasing yeshiva tuitions is simply too much for anyone – regardless of the family income level! This also increases stress levels, which can, and recently unfortunately has, lead to tragedy!
The yeshivas in Brooklyn are not doing that well financially either.
We need to lower our standards of living reducing the peer pressure.
No reason to make weddings for 800-900 people, that needs to stop with the Rebbes. The Rebbes live in the nicest of houses and make weddings for thousands of people and fly in Chassidim from all over the world, all expenses paid.
Ani oymer, bussing is a huge expense. And from Lakewood; who’s going to have their children ride a bus for 3-4 hours every day?
Chacham Einer,
A voucher system would increase taxes any more and NJ taxes are already the highest in the country. Also, a voucher system would mean that the schools would have to follow government mandates regarding secular education.
Yeshivas in the UK, France, Spain, Ireland, and Canada do get government funding. But it is not without strings. Are we willing to have our yeshivot teach a full secular studies curriculum and submit to all the standardized testing that accompanies it? I personally think that the tradeoff is well worth it, but we have to realize that it will be a big change and we have to convince our non-Jewish fellow citizens that we are worthy of the higher taxes that would be involved.
It is unfortunate that we as a whole are unable to support all Mosdos. However, closing some schools and combining them with others would likely be beneficial from a fiscal angle. There should be Yeshivas of all sorts in abundance all over the world. But not everyone looking for a job is necessarily qualified to open a Mosad let alone run one. Many of these very Mosdos are unique and provide for a niche student. However, how much of these are really “niches” and not just arrogance or other.
There was no problem raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in Lakewood for Rubashkin’s lawyers. Why are they letting yeshivas close? Why? There are other recent events (in Lakewood) that are triggers for this but I doubt YWN or anyone in leadership position has the courage to allow us to address those either. I am not a young man anymore but I can tell you that this is just the beginning unfortunately. We need to wake up from our deep sleep.
For those looking at vouchers as a solution, here is an(amusing) comment found on another site:
Serious Q. says:
If you believe in and support vouchers to solve the tuition crisis, then there is no reason to sit around waiting. A perfectly good substitute for vouchers already exists and is easily obtainable.
The type of vouchers that everyone is lobbying for are “revenue based” vouchers, i.e. the government will give money to the school to cover a student’s tuition. The additional source of revenue should help balance the budget. This is not very likely to happen soon enough. But there is another way to balance the budget – by reducing or subsidizing expenses. If we could get the government to subsidize the expenses of yeshivos, we would effectively have an “expense subsidy” voucher. Wouldn’t that be just as good? It would. Well, the good news is that it is already available, no lobbying required.
The biggest expense of any school is its teachers’ salaries and benefits. If we reduce the salaries to the levels at which government benefits kick in (EITC, free healthcare, etc), the schools will see a significant reduction in their expenses – but the Rebbeim and teachers will NOT see a loss in income!!! As many a kollel man has discovered, the value of government benefits – when income is carefully managed – can often equal or be more than the actual income one can earn. The value of free health insurance for large families is enormous, as is the value of free or heavily discounted tuition for Rebbeim. If we look at the complete package (an optimized salary, plus EITC, plus free tuition for kids, plus gov’t heath insurance, plus many other gov’t benefits), the pay under this model is FAR better than Rebbeim get under the current model – and will cost the schools THOUSANDS LESS PER PAYROLL!!!!!
The only thing you need is a savvy tax accountant or attorney to reverse engineer the proper salary level for each individual employee. If anyone says that they want vouchers, but doesn’t look into the “expense subsidy” vouchers, they are just full of hot air.
Finally, we see what the Government is doing to us. We are being treated as second-class citizens.
Those who send their children to the atheist/secular schools to be indoctrinated in officially-sanctioned decadence, get a free education in a multi-million dollar palace, with sports facilities and all the luxuries.
Those who choose to educate their children in a family-friendly decent Torah school, get the back of the hand, and are lucky not to be arrested for daring to reject the Government edicts.
Until now, our community was prosperous enough to carry the burden. Now, with the loss of so many jobs and businesses, the well is going dry, and we are forced to confront the reality of blatant Government discrimation against us.
We need to tighten our belts and start paying full tuitions. Let’s start with some real Takanos to cut the costs of weddings and engagements, and let’s lower our expectations of what is required to marry-off our children.
Starting first with Bais Yaakov elementary, then with Yeshiva bais hatorah & now with this yeshive. there can only be one main reason why this is all happening:
these kind of things happening & people being Niftar at young ages or in strange ways R”L are all wake up call to klal yisroel & to the people of that town, that we only care about ourselves, but when it comes to helping/caring for another yid then i cannot help you.
with that being the case, each time tragedy strikes Hashem has the same question-for each person separately-now you have woken up, now you are crying at this baby’s levaya R”L but when we hear of someone else in tragic cases… we dont care. hashem then wants to know if we will wake up now to help others or do we need another tragic WAKE-UP call from hashem C”V to care for one another?
#17: charliehall says:
“A voucher system would increase taxes any more and NJ taxes are already the highest in the country. Also, a voucher system would mean that the schools would have to follow government mandates regarding secular education.”
First, understand that school voucher systems come in a variety of flavors; they could involve the payment of state or federal money to the parents of private school children to offset the cost of tuition, books, or other educational expenses. So, New Jersey doesn’t necessarily need to fund the program solely. Second, vouchers are intended to allow citizens to spend their taxes toward the education of their choice without using a direct tax credit or deduction.
A more fundamental point though is that the concept of voucher payments represent a direct transfer of funds from the public school systems to private schools. The average frum parents of yeshiva students get nothing in return for their school taxes. Furthermore, the public schools are failing in many communities. Lastly, no public school could possibly accomodate the numbers of yeshiva students, should they even wish to attend them. Therefore, it behooves the local, state, and federal government to put in place some sort of voucher system.
In fact, Education Department figures a few years back showed that the average private elementary school tuition in America was less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private schools, elementary and secondary, was $3,116, or less than half of the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857.
Massive school bureaucracies divert scarce resources from real educational activities, deprive principals and teachers of any opportunity for authority and independence, and create an impenetrable bulwark against citizen efforts to change the school system. The school systems have become susceptible to influence only from special-interest groups, notably the teachers’ unions and other elements of the education establishment. Like factories of the former Soviet Union, America’s government schools are technologically backward, overstaffed, inflexible, unresponsive to consumer demand, and operated for the convenience of top-level bureaucrats.
Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued for the concept of vouchers in the 1950s, stating that competition would improve schools and cost efficiency. A voucher plan could create revolutionary demand for new educational institutions. If each and every family had the option of spending several thousand dollars on education – the millions that have heretofore gone to the government in taxes – we could reasonably expect educational entrepreneurs to respond, resulting in better private and public schools.
As to the concern you raise regarding standardized testing, I would not be worried. Our yeshiva students already take standardized tests. This would help maintain a high curriculum level.
From all the comments above, only #18 has stated the situation correctly. Every yeshiva claims to fill a “necessary niche”. Frankly, how many recipes for cholent do we actually need? It seems every yungerman who leaves kollel, but doesn’t want to seek secular employment, wants instead to open a mossad. Mosdos are not designed to provide jobs for the menahalim. In short, there are too many yeshivos. Combining them, even at the foregone risk of dinei Torah over which former rosh mossad should head the new, combined yeshiva, is the single route to survival. Only geiveh on the part of all these “niche” roshei mosdos will prevent that survival.
All the schools must get together and lobby the government to pay for the secular part of the students’ educations as you do pay school taxes. Some Canadian provinces have done this. Where I live, many years ago, all of the faith-based schools -Catholic,Christian and Hebrew worked together to achieve this. They actually threatened to close down and send all the kids to public schools. If all of the Yeshivot and Hebrew day schools closed for the day and each of these thousands of students were taken down to the local public school and enrolled, can you imagine what would happen? No way does the public school system have room for everyone. Yet you all pay for the privilege of this education. It is certainly worth trying. But a committee that can work TOGETHER must be formed and the government lobbied first.
Shesheis yomim t’avod will have to mean something to the yeshiva world before this can ever be solved – their economic model set up 40 years ago simply isn’t sustainable – in the third generation who’s left to support the yungeleit and his family?
They continue to act as if every male child is destined to bemust be a talmud chochum (causing emotional havoc for boys who are not learners), they scorn and refuse their daughters the ability to marry those who stoop to working for a living – and increasingly they’re broke. Quite preposterous when you think about it.
The Gemara in Shabbos 119b says: “The world is only sustained by the breath of the Tinokos Shel Beis Rabban.”
Does anyone know of a similar Gemara which attributes the continued existence of the world to the learning of kollel yungleit?
And so one needs to ask: How many millions of dollars were spent on Lakewood’s new Kleinman Family Campus, to accommodate yet more kollel yungleit, while the Tinokos Shel Beis Rabban of the community have the doors of their mosdos of Torah learning slammed in their faces (Rachmana Litzlan)? Is it possible that the community’s priorities are sadly misplaced? Just wondering (although many consider this an impertinent and embarrassing question that they don’t want publicly asked).