Teen Violence in Lakewood

@amil, they have Juvenile delinquent status so it’s under wraps.

To be honest, I’m not in Lakewood so I am not really up to date. But going on a few years ago it came down to that a mesivta would not increase it’s profile by having a full scholastic curriculum. Some had for diplomas. And some the rosh yeshiva believed in the idea. But the top mesivtas that have the ability to put in a high level program, were faced with very little interest from their own parent body.

When I posted that there is no market for it that was an exaggeration. I was responding to the theory that it was proactively prevented at the top from happening. That is a lie. It was attempted from the very top. And it failed because of lack of interest. As Lakewood grows there is more diversity. And there could be a really solid mesivta with a serious secular education. There always were lower level options that had English Studies.

In sum, none of this violence is because of learning only yeshivos. Unless these boys were sent to solid places instead of easier ones. But I doubt it. Because almost all these boys were struggling to stay in line while still in Middle School.

YS> I find that kids in schools who offer optional studies rarely take advantage of them and most just do the bare minimum.

The schools I described do not make these “optional”, they are simply online and clearly separate from the yeshiva curriculum. Also, having an additional tutor that could occasionally help/direct the students will make this model even more effective. Avi Chai foundation had several studies several years ago of online/blended studies like that in Jewish schools and have reports written up about it.

@n0mesorah It goes like this. Some 20 years ago, one or two very chashuva talmidei chachamim opened up mesivtos that followed the same learning model as the Cheder and Yeshivos Ketanos in Eretz Yisroel. They became very popular, mostly due to the Lakewood population boom in the 00s. Then, when other Mesivtas opened up, they didn’t want to start a non-Gemara based curriculum because they would immediately be seen as the B-listers where the Lo Yitzlochs go. It got the snowball rolling to the point where only very established Chashuveh places still teach math and science, because new schools know that they won’t get the top guys if they teach something other than Gemara and Halacha. So many parents who don’t follow this ridiculous mehalech, are stuck with only a small number of Yeshivos in town and way too many kids applying.

Lakewood needs to normalize teaching math, history, language, and science. And then maybe these violent teens won’t feel the need to betray their families.

Ujm, the basis for your claim?

Do we blame Ben Gurion for this – both positive and negative effets? He allowed special status for the few (remaining, outdated in his voew) yeshivos and this lead to proliferation of Torah and “Torah only” system in EY and, as mentioned above, then transitioned over to US?

It’s fun to blame whatever hashkafa we already don’t like, but I think it fails us when trying to understand the root causes.

Hit the nail on the head.

Examples in this thread of anti-Torah bias:

Blaming the community approach in a community which doesn’t have a higher prevalence

The ludicrous assumption that the troubled kids who haven’t connected with Torah would have connected with secular studies

The lack of recognition that there are definitely programs inside and outside of Lakewood which deal with boys who haven’t connected with Torah

Dear Dofi,

You may have a point, but it’s an irrelevant one. The teens we are discussing did not on the whole make it to high school. They had secular studies in elementary school. And it is more likely they struggled with math and science than with limudei kodesh. They may have struggled to keep with their peers in non academic activities as well.

Dear Gadol,

Warning: this is a hypothetical question. It is not based on any rumor or fact.

What if I tell you that some of these boys are good learners and should be learning a whole day, but feel like it reflects badly on themselves to be a learning boy? Or what if they could be top of their class but don’t want to live off of someone else’s dime?

Dear Yserbius,

Your dreaming. I don’t think you have any real access to Lakewood. So your excused for believing these old housewife tales. Neither of those two yeshivos were successful. One barely existed. The Other managed to fill a class, but the rabbeim revolted against the method and intensity. It was taken over and remade into an in-between approach. Mesivta has not been a problem for those boys because of a reason. But the fact is that Lakewood Mesivta did not have english before (Did it ever?) these two schools opened. And the top high schools in town dropped their programs around the turn of the century. The Roshei Yeshiva are open about it. It just failed due to lack of interest. The less intense high schools do offer secular studies and diplomas.

PS The boys system doesn’t really fight over top guys. The tension is over filling up. A low enrollment could bankrupt a yeshiva within a year.

N0m: please give the different possible definitions of a Yeshiva that you refer to.

N0 > The Lakewood model is not based on Israel.

I am following on YS suggestion. My knowledge of Lakewood is indeed superficial, based on occasional visits there and talking/observing visitors and refugees from there. When I mentioned my “Lakewood Teacher”, he travelled to where I was, not other way around and it was some time ago.

Still, I wonder whether YS has a point here. It seems to be a difference from early small Lakewood where top students did not have general classes with the recent growth of community, with now masses of people ignoring general curriculum. Are all students now at the level of the 1960s when R Malkiel was learning? maybe they are, tell me.

Dear Always,

Lakewood’s growth started thirty years ago.

The only high school in those few years that did not have a general curriculum was Mesivta of Lakewood.

Almost all top students went to learn out of town until much more recently. Or they did not remain top students.

Lakewood has many issues to address with the current growth of the masses. Almost none of them will be addressed at all. I don’t see why the larger scale of disinterest in general studies would be more of an issue. Moreover, I suspect that there is more interest in general studies now, than in the previous generation.

Rav Malkiel left Lakewood to learn in Boston at a tender age. The only frum high school (sorry the other one wasn’t) in Lakewood was the Sons of Israel crowd. And most definitely had a general curriculum. The elementary school was coed.

Whatever you were trying to say about elites and Lakewood of old is totally false. Please reflect on this before you post about Lakewood again.

N0,

Once again, name the Mesivtas in Lakewood proper that currently offer High School secular studies with a full diploma. Also, boys are pushed to become white collar bachurim, not the blue collar teens whom the system could care less about.

DaasYochid,

“The ludicrous assumption that the troubled kids who haven’t connected with Torah would have connected with secular studies”

Right, when people here keep saying “outlets”, they seem to be thinking algebra and history tests. I don’t think the troubled teens would see those as “outlets”, lol.

Yserbius123,

“different hashkafas have different things that put their teens at risk and have to put out different ways of helping them.”

I’m not sure that I agree with this – can you be more specific?

“In many MO communities, teens become too enamored with the dark sides of secular society so they have organizations like NCSY to steer them on the right path. In some communities, however, they close their ears and say “La la la can’t hear you learn more Torah!” instead of addressing the 800 pound gorilla.”

I don’t think this is true or fair. Sometimes NCSY helps a teen connect to Yiddishkeit and steer him away from trouble. Sometimes it does not. Should an outsider to the MO community then conclude from those not helped that the MO community is doing nothing to help these troubled teens? There’s some troubled teens in my community who disrupted a NCSY social party-type event to the point that they were told to leave and (allegedly) police were called. I’ve seen those same teens attending evening youth-focused learning programs offered by a local kollel and not disrupting it. I think the big difference was in the atmosphere – one was a swarm of teens plus 1 or 2 adults there to shout a dvar Torah, and one was a beis medrash with many adults and some teens mixed in attending a shiur. Is the NCSY route really superior to the derided “learn more Torah”? And as Gadolhadorah noted earlier, studies, outlets, and activities are not sufficient to really help the underlying problems these kids are having.

Dear Yserbius,

Apologies. Not really. I am mildly annoyed at your assumption of the facts. You don’t know what this specific story is about. [Almost nobody does.] And your not at all correct about the making of Lakewood Mesivtas. [Almost nobody cares.]

Whatever can help struggling kids, is water under the bridge. It is hard to say that this is from the schools without a clear pattern emerging. And the fact that Lakewood is now producing dozen of well behaved, blue collar teens, is enough to not immediately blame the gemara obsession and the like. Your theories can have a lot of truth to them, yet remain inapplicable.

As to “general lack of interest” it is not a seething indication to anything let alone indictment. Apathy is in abundance throughout the American Jewish scene. It varies community to community what they are apathetic about, but all in all the great unifying factor of today’s Judaism is lack of interest. It is remarkable that the post war generation worked tirelessly to build, their grandchildren are to disinterested to maintain.

N0,

Are you actually accusing those who disagree with you of being untruthful?

@Always_Ask_Questions I would absolutely cheer on any program that is set up to teach skills to frum youth. However, I fear that such programs would be considered only for kids at risk instead of being normalized as they should. This has happened in goyishe public schools in the last few decades where they phased out shop class since it was seen as a place for dumb brutes. Now less academically inclined students are left with few options when it comes to what they can be successful at in school with and often act out.

@Avram-In-MD I’m simply saying that different communities with different hashkafos often have different reasons for some kids becoming at risk. In the communities that essentially tell children that if they can’t learn for 10 hours a day and do nothing else for most of their lives that they are failures, kids who can’t do that often act out.

@n0mesorah I don’t know what you mean. Thirty years ago, there were a tiny handful of non-Chassidish American Mesivtas that had a Gemara-only approach. Now (especially in Lakewood) it’s the norm. It started somewhere and I surmise that it started with one, two, or three places in Lakewood and then spread.

Dear Dofi,

I don’t know that I disagree with you and the chorus. People are not being truthful with the facts. The reason for my harping on that is still to come.

Dear Yserbius,

“communities that essentially tell children that if they can’t learn for ten hours a day”

A community that expects the kids to learn ten hour a day?!? Tell me where and I’ll be looking for a wife today. Lakewood is far removed from such a description.

Um, do you mean Yeshiva Beis Binyomin of Stamford?

Your assuming that it was an ideological choice. My guess is that is has to do with feasibility. Education can’t be willed upon the students. And (barring plentiful funds) it has to be worth the investment.

Dear Ujm,

In his time he did. Now what?

@ujm But just previously, the other guy said that the Roshei Yeshivos had no issue with secular studies and it was the parents who just weren’t interested! Which one is it? Come to think of it, I cannot recall a single American Rosh Yeshiva stating that it’s “imperative today to eschew secular studies”, especially since that would be cholek on some of the most prominent Roshei Yeshivos alive today in places like Philly, Torah Vodaas, Chaim Berlin, and Darchei Torah.

As we discussed here earlier, Rav Moshe did not suggest college for general public because it was possible to have a median American lifestyle with a job without it. He clearly allowed some students to be on college track, less the parents take the kids out of yeshiva, as ujm mentions. Maybe other motivations also – otherwise, why his own daughter went to college. As median American job now does require a college degree (possibly way inferior and less demanding in study but more in money than during R Moshe’s times), what would R Moshe pasken now? Also, what was R Moshe’s (and R Aharon’s) position on using non-Jewish charity – welfare/disability/single-parent benefits/etc, esp when it is public knowledge?

@ujm So then name them and quote what they said. As far as I know, there was one Rosh Yeshiva (who himself went to a Yeshiva high school where he studied math, history, etc. and is now considered one of the Gedolim) twenty years ago said that in Eretz Yisroel there are more talmidei chachamim because the Yeshivos only teach Gemara and halacha. However, various members of the Moetzes openly disagreed with him and he himself has backtracked on that statement (and continued to lead a Mesivta that has a full curriculum in math, history, etc.).