Do we really need Seminary in Israel?

I think you just answered your own question.

I wish there were alternatives in North America too. It’s very tough on out of town parents whose daughters are not academic or Lakewood material.

OTOH, some parents I know have brought the costs down through Federation etc. grants that are only available to Israeli programs. And their kids get real – minimizing phone use, cooking their own meals(BTW, some sems do do 3 squares a day), taking buses and walking whenever possible. Trip to Europe? Not part of our game plan. Neither is coming home for Pesach.

B”H we’ve dealt with three Israeli seminaries that yeah, are businesses in that they’re someone’s parnasa, but who have always telegraphed that their purpose is in educating our daughters and helping them grow. The proof of the pudding is the strong relationships my children still have with some of the staff.

Israeli seminaries are not just about learning, they’re out to make money. Not just a decent living – they want to make big bucks.

If you want proof, just think: when was the last time one of these seminaries had a fund-raising event?

The simple and truthful answer is WE DO NOT “NEED” Seminary in Israel. Like all other things in our culture, wants have become needs. We have become obssesed with trends that the frum community begins and folow blindly. For a nation thats supposed to be full of ingeniuty and individual thought brought uopn by the study of our holy Torah, we have become robots who do what everyone else does without putting an ounce of thought into it. Seminaries is a classic example.

No. Which gadol’s wife went to seminary in Israel? Is there one? 🙂

It is a way to support (very generously) people living in E”Y, but you could plant trees for the difference (in Beitar, where it will also help Torah Yidden) and get the same result. Perhaps your daughter may even be realistic about marriage and life/money if she doesn’t go to Israel, and goes to a Bais Yaakov graduate program instead. ;-

Sem Tatty-

For some girls, yes, the price of seminary is worth it. For other girls, there actually are sems in America, and there has been an increase in girls staying home and going to these local seminaries, parents just can’t afford it. especially if you have a large family of seven girls, that is $20,000 times seven, and the prices have gone up as the dollar is worth less in Israeli currency, plus air line tickets have really gone up. So don’t send to seminary if you think it’s not worth it, and explore the american options.

Dear lammed hey,

I am very sorry to admit that I am not privy to the personal lives of all the gedolim and their families. And if I did I would not share such intimate information with everyone and anyone. quite frankly, its not tznius.

But I have a question for you. Which Gedolim use boxers and which use briefs according to your sources?

I think it’s pretty clear that seminary in EY is really nothing more than a trend that has been fueled by affluence and solidified by peer pressure. On its heels, an entire industry of seminary-related businesses have sprung up and an increasing portion of the frum ecomnomy is being tied this trend. As with so many other economic trends, it is the middle-class that gets crushed to the point where the frum middle-class now has yet another unaffordable “must have” with which it must contend, along with all of the negative things that come along with it (job stress, sholom bayis stress, stress-related health issues, etc.)

…and Shindy, I don’t thnk there has been an increase in the number of girls staying home. I think if you take a casual survey of people you know, you will find that over the last 10 years or so the percentage of girls in a typical northeastern Bais Yaakov type graduating class that go to sem in EY has increased from about 60% to over 90%. The trend is so near-universal at this point, that american seminaries are actually closing down because they simlpy can no longer attract a critical mass of girls with which to run their businesses.

Bentzy18,

I have no doubt that learning in EY is, for many youngsters, an unmathced experience. This is a refrain repeated often by those sending their daughters. For those for whom the money is no object, it helps justify the extravagance. For those who struggle to pay for it, it helps ease the pain. At the end of the day, however, it is an extravagance. Perhaps its an enriching one, but it is just one of many enriching extravagances, that I could imagine in a world of unlimited resources and time. The real question is why did this particular enriching extravagance go from luxury to necessity (There can be little doubt that it is largely because no one wants to be the parent who has to tell his child “Sorry, but we just can’t afford it.) And in doing so, have we done more harm to our community than good. As with so many other frum trends, we really need to ask ourselves if the COMMUNAL price we are paying is worth the benefit derived especially in comparison to the prior generation that seems to have turned out just fine with only a sliver of its consituency having spent the year in EY.

The fact is that if nothing else seminaries are a means of stereotyping in today’s information overload crisis mode shiduch market. However, its worth considering if you want to be stereotyped, or if you are connected enough that you don’t need to be.

another point to think about: As the wife of an avreach who lives in EY we host sem girls all the time. they come over erev shabbos and from the minute they walk in the door don’t stop eating (except the anreix ones) till shabbos is over. don’t get me wrong I love having guests it’s a taste of home, but what are their parents paying for? so I have to scrap together money to buy a second loaf of fish? and than they want to use the phone, do laundry sometimes etc. . . these girls are thrown out of thier dorms all the time! not given the services their parents pay for.

I once asked girls from a really frum sem which hechsherim their were told to eat, they told me they which ones. I realized that these girls fathers would not approve of these hechsherim and I don’t belive that the principals of this sem would touch those hechshers with a ten foot pole. to earn a little extra money and buy their kids apartments in j-m they use all kinds of hechsherim for the girls. who supervises the kashrus in these palces? do you know who your daughter’s teachers are? which families they go to for shabbos? what hashkafas they are teaching you daughters. I have heard some crazy things from girls over the years. (usually the same things from the same sem every year)

As a postsemgirl as you can tell from my name, I agree with bored@work. semtatty- girls in sem do NOT have to eat out every night,parents should not have to dish out so much extra money, girls can take buses, and they do not have to go to europe. The kind of girl you are talking about is a JAP who while in eretz yisroel totaly misses the boat and see’s it as a year to spend her parents money and thinks she is still in america having all the luxeries she is used to. Insead of bad mouthing sem you should think about how the child was brought up! I know these types of kids. they don’t eat any meals in sem thinking they have to go out to eat and they are to chashuv to ride in a bus and must take taxis and they need to talk for hours to their friends back home………………. I can go on an on since I was roomates with two of these types of girls. However you can call up my father who send 4 daughters to sem and ask him if his money was worth it and he will tell you that it was worth every penny. His daughters learned independence and responsibility and gained a chashivus for eretz yisroel. one more thing, it was very sad to see that girls who had count downs the day sem started. it is true that those type of girls should not be in sem and every parent has to decide if his/her daughter should go to sem.

Re semtatty: I would hope my kids would maintain a kesher to mechanchim/mechanchos in American sems too. I was just saying that to illustrate that not all is hopeless.

And as far as feeling bad about our kids not being able to engage in all the activities their friends do: I felt bad when my daughter told me about things she missed out on because she was budgeting, but then I realized how displaced these feelings were. It was a good experience for her and frankly my kids know how much goes into this year and are grateful to be there. They have a much better perspective than other kids. And that’s it as far as our financing their education – they take out student loans. It’ll be interesting when we get to our boys, whose education will be our responsibility for quite a few years longer. Hashem yaazor, iy”H.

bored@work and postsemgirl, you are the last people who are able to be objective about this topic. Of course your seminary experience was wonderful. The question was if it is necessary and worth the money. As someone who graduated from seminary about 10 years ago, I can honestly say that at this point, you cannot tell the difference between who went to sem in e”y and who didn’t. Someone I know who didn’t go to sem at all is now living in e”y and supporting her husband in kollel. I didn’t go sem in e”y but I live there now, and people ask me if I would’ve been more prepared to live here had I gone to sem. here and my answer is not at all. Sem. is nice and why not learn when you can, but I don’t think it really is preparation for real life. As far as being in e”y, you can get the same thing out of touring here for a few weeks.

Besides, I think that sem does a disservice by convincing the girls to marry a certain type of boy that there isn’t enough of on the “market”, and that they deserve to be supported by their parents.

Sem Tatty, wait ’til your daughter is looking for a shidduch. 20k will seem like nothing compared to what the boys will ask for. Speaking of shidduchim, I haven’t seen that where a girl went to seminary makes a difference.

My daughter is still a baby, but I do not plan on spending the money to send her to seminary in e”y. I can’t honestly say what I would do if all her friends were going, but I think it’s ridiculous.

To semtatty,

Rav Kaminetsky zt”l said that sherut le’umi removes the total control that a father has over his daughter. My point was that seminary is no different. As many of these posts have pointed out, seminary girls may go on buses, go to town, eat out, eat at homes where the hechsher isn’t what Tatty demands, visit families where the hashkafa isn’t to Tatty’s liking, talk on the cellphone and text message without Tatty knowing to whom, go touring, and even go to Europe. Total control like Rav Yaakov prescribes? Doesn’t sound like it.

Bored@work said:

“Having just returned from Israel this past year I would say seminary is an essential thing to a Jewish girls life”

This is the kind of statment that truly baffles me. I simply cannot comprehend how any reasonably intelligent person can look at the experience of the last 1 1/2 generations of frum life in America and make a statement like that.

Forgive me if I make any insensitive assumptions about your family but let me ask:

Is your mother over 50? Did she go to seminary in EY? Is she an eishes chayil?

Perhaps the answers are yes, yes, and yes. Fine. But surely the overwhelming majority of frum women you know from the the last generation (those now between 45 and 65) are wonderful jewish wives and mothers, are proud of the American chinuch they received, and somehow managed to become such people without the benefit of a year in EY.

Again, I’m not going to quibble with the question of whether going to sem in EY is a positive experience. I’m sure it is. I simply want to know how so many people can be so (willingly?) blind to the simple reality that our very recent history proves beyond any doubt that it is not “an essential thing to a jewish girl’s life”.

Now of course that is just my Daas BalHabayis. Well, for what its worth, within the last three years, I have personally asked two well-repected New York Rabbonim for the feelings about girls going to EY and both expressed misgivings about whether it was , on the whole, a good thing. But again, just to be clear, let’s assume it IS a good thing, my key point is IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL – IT IS A LUXURY AND SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE OTHER LUXURIES. Which means, first and formeost that I would suggest the following rule of thumb to 12th grade girsl. If at any time in the last 12 months you have heard your parents having a stressful discussion about money, do not ask them to send you to EY. If they offer, fine. But don’t ask.

I don’t understand the issue:

If money is no object, then who cares.

If money is an object, than your money is better off spent on spending an extra year (maybe two) in Kollel with your husband. (assuming that is what you want by the time you finish high school). 25K can go a long way, even when you are married.

Two exceptions:

1: where the father wants his daughter to “be brainwashed” (for lack of a better term), where sem MAY accomplish that.

2: Where the child needs to get away from home in a semi-supervised place, such as when she needs to grow up. In those cases, Manchester (or other Sem in Europe) or Baltimore (or any other US seminary)if you don’t live there will do the job. She may even become more into yiddishkeit than if she went to Israel.

If you just want her to have the “Israel experience”, take a vacation with the family (or just her), it will cost less.

I do hear what you are all saying, I do not know how you are comparing our generation to ones before us, even our parents, becuase we grew up in different lives and we just cant compare. Our generation is also into making things easy and as simple as possible. Some things u learn in seminary such as independance u can learn in life experince, but if were so into making things as simple as possible, y not in this area as well. But that is not even why I think it is a must. The lessons I have learnt have not only made me make changes in my life, but see life in a totally different way. I do see a difference in everyday things with my friends who did not go to seminary and those who did. You can speak to your daughter and say if she really wants to go, maybe she could help out financially, not paying for seminary, but maybe she can make some extra money, or i have friends who either chipped in on their spending money with their parents, or paid for the food by themselves. Europe is a totally different story, Amazing and should be mandetory for every person. AND NO I AM NOT ON A SEMINARY HIGH!!

I am a post seminary girl who attended seminary in the United States. I have a few comments to make in response to what I read on the previous posts. First of all, you cannot compare this generation to the generation that was 50 years ago. Times have changed and most girls graduating high school now are not yet ready to ‘go out into the real world’ yet. The amount of bad influences there are in the world is tremendous and not all 17/18 year-old girls are ready to handle them. Finishing high school is a very crucial time in people’s lives…

That being said, seminary in Eretz Yisroel is definitely a luxury. Observing my friends who have come back from seminary a year ago have made me realize what a world of good seminary in Israel can do, but I still consider it a tremendous luxury. There are seminaries in the US that cost a third of the price of the ones in E”Y.

I attended an out-of-town seminary in the US and gained tremendously from it. I connected with my teachers, who are all Gedolim in Torah or Neshai Chayil that are pillars of their community. Eretz Yisroel is not the only option!

Mz. bored@work:

Was it worth one possibly two years of Kollel learning? (the answer may be yes, but please justify). Also please answer why you feel E”Y was better than a more local Sem.

Please don’t answer me that getting married soon is only a shema, and one would have time to save, (or that you don’t need money to stay in kollel) as that would be too depressing.

I am already 5 years out of a seminary in brooklyn. Almost ALL my friends went to Israel. Out of a class of about 100 girls maybe 10-15 stayed and I’m being liberal. For the girls in my class who went to Israel (about 90 girls) there were no radical frumkeit adjustments. If you were really frum to begin with and you went to a really frum school, you stayed that way and if they would have stayed in Brooklyn and gone to a really frum school here they would have turned out the same. And the girls who didn’t care and went to one of the “camp” type seminaries in Israel had a great time, again no change. So no point in going to Israel the serious girls stayed serious and the girls who want to have a good time just spent 20-25k on a wonderful Israel vacation that lasted a year.

My experience in a Brooklyn seminary is that there is almost little or no point in going. They have a lot of text based classes (2 chumashim, 2 nivim, halacha…) Most of the teachers were high school teachers and frankly they weren’t as good as the ones I had in 12th grade. At a time when I was supposed to be done with HS and entering adulthood the seminary treated us like we were in 9th grade again, and it was more than obvious that most of the girls were there just for shidduch purposes. I found that the shiurim I went to at night on my own time were much more interesting and growth inspiring than what we were learning in sem.

All in all I’m against seminary all together. Not that it can’t be a good thing, but most sems in brooklyn aren’t up to par and most of the girls going there are also working and in college and just don’t care about it enough for it to be worth the money it costs.

Now married with a baby, I don’t see how my friends who went to Israel were more prepared than I was to handle “real life.” If anything I went to college and got my degree much faster. I had to juggle work school and sem which teaches you more about real life than any year in Israel could.

I don’t understand the problem here. There are certain things that people must do in order to accomplish other things. Just like a person has to go to work if he wants to provide for his family, so to a girl has to go to seminary if she wants to get a shidduch. Don’t cry or complain about it. I don’t complain about having to go to work. It doesn’t mean I like it. I t just means that I know what I want And I act accordingly. I believe thats the definition of maturity. You people are a bunch of babies.

So NOW are you happy?

The saddest thing about this discussion is that you are talking about someone davka coming to E”Y for a year or two, instead of a permanent commitment to coming and staying in E”Y.

rebetzin, I was also in Yavne! And I ditto what you just said… There were no ‘hashkafa talks’ or debates… Words like ‘kollel’ or ‘shalom bayis’ never even came up in class… The only hashkafa class we had my year was Igros Mussar. Any other hashkafa I received from my seminary year I pulled out of Chumashim, Neviim, Kesuvim, and Halacha that we learned…

I don’t think we can judge about sem being camp because every sem is different.

Rebbetzin- I did gain a lot in sem and my haskafos were solified maybe when I have a toddler I will have more patients since the lessons I learned will stay with me forever. Every girl is different and eveyone learns in another way. Some go to eretz yisroel and some don’t. I think there is no point in this disscussion because everything is hashgacha and everyone ends up where he or she are suppose to be.