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If you do not mind driving around a bit, philly and the brandywine valley might be of interest. In addition to being a place of history, including a Jewish museum, there is also a frum community. It has world class art and science museums and if any of the high schoolers want to look at a college with a frum population, u of penn would be in session with one of the finest hillels in America. Venturing beyond the city, Longwood Gardens has no peer as a botanic garden and a little south into Delaware, Winterthur attracts visitors from around the world to see the furnishing collections. West toward Lancaster is a different kind of frum community, that of the Amish Mennonites. While it is a little touristy, there are railroad museums, horse & buggies, and some open farms as well as a few reasonably authentic farmers markets. And then there are some of the largest collection of shopping outlets around.
Real furry people were common in my native Monsey, more of a curiosity in the place I currently practice.
I am reading two different issues. First is a student who might be suitable for the yeshiva’s incoming class but a shidduch between school and potential student has not yet taken place. There would be nothing wrong with asking current talmidim who the school might seek out for mutual benefit with no obligation to either side until formal application process takes place. That is how universities assemble their varsity athletic teams or encourage national merit scholars to attend.
The more questionable process involves assessment of a potential student who has already expressed interest which generally includes providing a cadre of personal references but the school then seeks additional references surreptitiously and without the candidate’s consent, or even knowledge. Dina d’malchut dina. There are states that have laws that specifically require disclosure of referee comments to the candidate unless specifically waived. The yeshiva seems to be bypassing that legal protection in what it is doing. The potentially unwelcome assessments of the student have no particular accountibility for what they say nor does the school incur a responsibility for verification. Probably not a good practice. I’ll let others assess whether it is appropriate to halacha.
As the one who actually depends on people having insurance so that they pay me for the medical care I give them, there are a few remarks that do not seem clear from the other posters. First, “A Healer who charges nothing is worth nothing.” (Bava Kama, I think) The professionalism of medicine enables the quality to remain high, though serious prospects of recovery from life threatening illness is really a phenomenon of the last century. There is very little divergent opinion that doctors like myself derive a personal and professional satisfaction from taking care of patients who benefit from the specialized skill and that fair payment is expected for having acquired the skills and for being available when needed.
Over time, in America at least, that basic Talmudic principle has gotten distorted. Accessibility of people who need care has become haphazard and payment to those who provide care has become inconsistent as well. There are three elements to reform: Accessibility, Affordability and Quality. Most of the world, including Eretz Yisrael have corrected the first two elements, everyone struggles with the third. It is only in America that cost does not run in parallel with quality. There are data from Medicare that show detrimental results of profligate care and better outcomes with less intervention. There are patients in my community who get all sorts of imaging studies of dubious benefit, expensive patent protected pills when $4 monthly generics will serve the purpose. Medical care is generated by the doctors but currently there is no means of restraining excess. Medicare has been a total failure in this. Universal accessibility has been achieved for Americans age 65+ via medicare. Quality is fairly good though inconsistent.
The other elements of the population score largely a zero in the elements of Accessibility, Cost Effectiveness, and Outcome data. For that reason, pretty much anything the elected officials do to intervene will serve as something of an upgrade. For those old enough to remember, there were privately generated cost containment efforts in the early 1990’s that sacrificed accessibility to achieve and created an overhead that really limited too little care to justify the expense of hiring case managers to oversight this. For the most part, what the doctors requested for their patients was reasonable and it was cheaper to let some extra expense go through than to hire people to contain them. The government is not likely to contain them either, nor are patients as consumers, even if medical insurance changes to a high deductible form.
In my medical office we ask patients not to use their cell phones in the waiting room. We certainly do not confiscate them but it is a courtesy to others who may need to be next to each other for a while. The yeshiva must contend with a comparable issue, that of unwelcome disruption which, without rules, could descend into disrespect for its classrooms and its teachers. Having completed my entire formal education before the invention of the cell phone, I can attest that it is quite possible to deal with urgencies without them.
The rosh yeshiva and the school’s governance have the right to set policy and enforce policy, which would include banning certain items and discreet search for contraband when its presence is seriously suspected. I think frisking a kid in the middle of the hall or doing a strip search at all would violate basic principles of avoiding public humiliation, that I hope every rebbe would hold in utmost regard.
At the risk of changing direction on this, I would nominate a very secular person who has devoted himself through the completed decade of expanding the possibilities of individual Jews in whatever circumstance he finds them. Michael Steinhart has profound respect for the Orthodox tradition as the only successful, stable form of Judaism in America. He certainly used a portion of his very large pushka to support organizations that enhance that stability, including the Hillel of my Alma Mater. His perspective of Judaism, though, extends to enhancing some of the less successful members. Mr. Steinhart is best known as the developer of the birthright program to bring young Jews at any level of starting point to one further along. Much like Ben Franklin who retired at a young age to devote himself to public service, Mr. Steinhart set aside his quest for an ever large fortune to make Judaism better than he found it.
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If anyone is interested in the evolution of boxing, or a lot of other sports, in the Jewish-American scene, I would recommend Jewish Encounter with American Sports by Jeffrey Gurock, history prof at YU, written about 5 years ago. The writing tends to be a little scholarly and sometimes difficult to read but he touches on the content of Jewish athletics dating to the Greek gymnasiums, a relatively dormant period until the 19th century in Germany, then a more constistent role in America with institutional sponsorship and cult heroes.
To A600 and Charlie:
As I conclude a thirty year tenure as a physician the activity that I do is not nearly as alluring as it once was, and for many of us not sufficiently lucrative to slog away.
My medical school, a Jesuit institution of which I am most proud, does indeed have an increasing fraction of islamic students, something not at all present during my time there in the mid 1970’s. The Internal Medicine Residency program of my current medical center about halfway between NY and Washington depends on decent students and doctors from various parts of Asia who over time have become valued colleagues. There is nothing wrong with them as physicians, yet it portends a change in what the pool of applicants find attractive. This being my 20th consecutive XMas on call, the Jewish doctors who would constitute an easier minyan than at any of our synagogues that day are notably older. There are more non-Jews who now take their turn in the hospital on what for most people is the most desirable day to be home. There weren’t all that many Islamists or Hindus working with me this weekend. The selection of who takes call seems to reflect a combination of lack of seniority within some groups or volunteers who no longer have children at home in other groups. I do not know the statistics, but I suspect the Jewish dominance in medicine was on the wane.
Recently an old friend from Rockland County where I was raised was admitted to the regional hospital. To satisfy my curiosity, I looked up some of the internal medicine and specialty rosters of physicians, expecting to see a place with Jewish physicians and Catholic nurses. Not so. They have a lot of Asians doing the direct patient care and the obviously Jewish doctors seemed older. I think that trend is likely to continue with less practitioners and fewer scientist among our lantzmen.
Being the Jewish doctor of our group, I found myself seeing what happens with people who are so sick that they cannot be with their families on their premier holiday, as I have done nearly every year since 1976. Medicare keeps the hospital an me solvent. There is a question of whether the medicare beneficiaries benefit from my of the stuff guys like me ask labs and pharmacies to do on their behalf but those people pretty much gets what the doctor requests, except for outpatient expensive prescriptions.
At the other extreme are people like I consulted upon this morning who at age 32 has a chronic progressive disease not doing well despite some rather expensive intervention. Despite his skill as a computer programmer, which has afforded him some decent positions with major companies, he cannot maintain employment, he is uninsurable by any actuarial standard in America. Eventually medicare disability will provide for his needs but a whole lot of the care that many of us give him out of necessity will not be compensated. That would not be the case if he lived in Eretz Yisrael or north or our national border.
The political arguments in America are well known. The application of halacha to what is a national blight remains very unclear. I think people are obligated to seek medical care when sick so any disincentive to this runs contrary to my understanding of the principles of shmerat ha-guf. When Israel debated its health care reforms in the 1990’s the expected communal outcome dominated the discussion. Here it seems to be what’s good for me when perhaps the Jewish approach should be more appropriately what is good for us.