Professor Aaron Twerski: The State and City’s treatment of our yeshivas is “abhorrent” and “would lead to the destruction of Torah education in our schools.”

In an early morning filing, Bobov, Chabad and Satmar submitted a thorough federal civil rights complaint detailing the discriminatory practices of the New York City and State Education Departments.targeting their yeshivas. They complain that “the discriminatory conduct pervades every aspect of yeshiva education,” and explain that if the City and State got their way “they would no longer be Jewish schools.”

Among the charges is that New York has targeted Jewish Studies (limudei kodesh) classes for discriminatory treatment; prohibits yeshivas but not public schools from teaching required classes in a foreign language; and seeks to force yeshivas to use texts that they and their parent body find objectionable.

On this last point, the yeshivas revealed that a New York City Department of Education employee, Robin Singer, has explicitly directed yeshivas to assign texts that are unacceptable to them. She explained that the purpose was to make sure that yeshiva students were “exposed to a range of materials that their parents and schools wouldn’t otherwise permit them to read.”

The complaint also highlights New York’s double standard when it comes to dual-language instruction, quoting a senior State Education Department official who told a conference of school administrators that its English-only language requirement for yeshivas “is one difference in . . . what happens in district [public] schools” and nonpublic schools.

He left no doubt that this double-standard targeted yeshivas by providing the following example: “[I]f you do go to a school where they say we have great history instruction and it’s actually happening in the morning in our Talmudic class, and you go to see it and it is in Aramaic, that would not qualify” as credited instruction.”

Professor Aaron Twerski, a longtime law professor at Brooklyn College and a leading legal scholar said in an interview that “the civil rights complaint is totally justified. The state and city education departments have unfairly targeted our schools. Their refusal to recognize Jewish studies as part of a satisfactory curriculum is abhorrent. Their actions would lead to the destruction of Torah education in our schools.”

As the complaint alleges, New York’s actions are particularly troubling because “its discriminatory dismissal of yeshiva education is contrary to the way it deals with other cultures. In 2018, New York adopted a “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework” that is intended “to assist in the promotion and perpetuation of cultures, languages and ways of knowing that have been devalued, suppressed, and imperiled.” But not the Jewish culture.

One yeshiva administrator told YWN, “the City and State have respect for all cultures except the Jewish culture and for all forms of education except for Jewish education.”

The complaint makes clear that it is not challenging the regulations adopted in 2022 by the State Education Department. As YWN readers are aware, a lawsuit challenging those regulations is now pending in the New York Court of Appeals.

Rather, the subject of the “Complaint is New York’s discriminatory conduct and practices against Complainant (and other) Yeshivas. New York seems to believe that it has the leverage to push the Yeshivas to deemphasize their Jewish Studies and to standardize and secularize their curricula. That is the conduct that is the subject of this Complaint.”

“The allegations in the complaint paint a concerning picture, raising serious questions as to whether the New York State Education Department and New York City Department of Education have implemented their educational standards without bias or discrimination,” said Michael A. Helfand, the Brenden Mann Foundation Chair of Law and Religion at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor at Yale Law School.

The complaint also reveals that the New York City Department of Education refused repeated requests to accommodate a small cheder in Williamsburg when it wanted to observe its eight-grade classroom. The cheder asked the City to send male evaluators to visit the classroom of boys already the age of bar mitzva, but the City repeatedly refused. The City had observed the lower grades in the cheder on several prior visits, each time sending an all-female team of evaluators. While the cheder accommodated the City on those visits, the City steadfastly refused to accommodate the cheder’s request when visiting a class of 13 year old bochurim.

The Yeshivas state plainly that “taken together, these discriminatory practices would strip the Yeshivas of their essential Jewish character.”

“Individually and together, each of the five discriminatory practices is targeted toward a goal of stripping the Yeshivas of their unique Jewish cultural heritage, customs, and practices. It gets at what they teach their students, the language of the instruction they offer, the texts they use to teach it, who offers the instruction, and even the make-up of the classroom.”

The federal Department of Education has oversight authority over both the New York City Department of Education and the New York State Education Department, each of which receives substantial federal funds. The Yeshivas asked the federal government to thoroughly investigate their discriminatory practices and to force them to remediate their discriminatory conduct.

According to Professor Helfand “Title VI provides a vehicle for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to assess these sorts of allegations and ensure that state agencies are living up to standards of equality when implementing their standards for education.”

As the yeshivas observed in their complaint, “In an era when the gulf between society’s values and those promoted by Jewish schools is getting wider and tolerance for differences is getting narrower, only the federal government can ensure that the Yeshivas can pursue their missions free from local government interference.”

They further explain that if the discrimination against yeshivas “is allowed to continue, it will make a mockery of over a century of Supreme Court precedent guaranteeing parents the right to direct their children’s upbringing by choosing parochial school education for them and the autonomy of parochial schools to fulfill their religious mission.“

The Complaint lands in Washington exactly one week before the Trump Administration takes office. In the first Trump Administration, the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights aggressively protected against anti-semitism and discrimination against Jewish students on college campuses across the country.

YWN and the entire community looks forward to seeing the incoming Trump Administration protect our yeshivas and students from the bureaucrats in New York who are trying to transform them.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)