The Montreal Gazette reports:
The Satmar Hasidic community has begun a court battle to stop the Quebec government from closing down its school.
The school in question, Academie Yeshiva Toras Moshe on Casgrain Ave., provides religious instruction and complementary secular teaching to about 150 boys from the Hasidic community’s 320 families.
But the school, which devotes 35 hours a week to religious studies and only six to secular subjects, is not following the basic curriculum required of all schools, Quebec government lawyer Eric Dufour told Judge Gerard Dugre yesterday.
The curriculum calls for nine hours a week of language training, seven hours for maths and two hours of physical education/health in every public and private school at the early elementary level, subsidized or not.
Also none of Yeshiva Toras Moshe’s six secular teachers has a permit to teach. The school hires staff from the Satmar or other Orthodox communities that “understands its values,” an administrator said.
After four years of negotiations, the education department is seeking a permanent injunction to close the school and a temporary one to do so immediately while core issues are argued in another court.
Dugre suggested religious freedom guarantees in the Canadian and Quebec rights charters might be invoked on appeal if the court closes the school.
“You are asking me to create jurisprudence,” he told Dupre, who countered the Satmar school, operating without a permit, is breaking the law.
There are precedents for exceptions being made to the public instruction act. “Equivalence” can be granted to some of the Talmudic studies in lieu of secular courses.
The education minister also may exempt a religious non-profit organization from following the full curriculum.
“We are ready to make changes, but there are limits,” the school’s lawyer, Jean Lemoine, cautioned.
He stressed that education for ultra Orthodox Jewish communities is no trivial matter, but a “religious obligation.”
“Diligent study of the Torah, along with its various codices of the law … permeates our lives,” school director David Meisels said in an affidavit.
“We are not allowed, nor are we in any position to compromise on it,” he added.
“Complementary secular education must be in conformity with the principles of our religion … it cannot detract from religious studies,” Meisels stressed.
The case continues today.
Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!
(Source: Montreal Gazette)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
9 Responses
Many in the New York area say “why should I care if a candidate for governor or senator is for toayva rights, or toayva marriage, that has nothing to do with US. We care about getting funding for our causes, etc.”
Well…
This article should tell us WHY we MUST be concerned with the kind of people we elect!
Just as this school in the article is struggling to be allowed to keep IT’S curriculum, the SAME could happen here.
The day could definitely come when, chalila, for a school to operate, they may be told you MUST employ some percentage of toayva teachers, and/or you must teach a curriculum that includes teaching the legitimacy of the toayva lifestyle!
We CAN’T say we don’t care about that issue, that it’s not relevant to US. It could become all TOO relevant to us.
as usual, gentiles using their numbers through the government to commit crimes.
enahak : The only crime that is being committed is by the yeshiva for giving the students a second class education. A lot of these kids will be functionally illiterate when they “graduate” from high school. For goodness sake, the secular studies teachers are not even qualified according to provincial standards.
While I’m wary of government intrusion into private schools business, its a bigger problem that all the kids going to these schools are going to have absolutely no chance of getting anywhere in life with that type of education.
Getting nowhere in life is good. It’s exactly what they want.
Keep em dumb, and they won’t escape.
3,
Who said they are getting a “second class education?” They are getting the education THEIR PARENTS want them to receive. Just because YOU are not happy with that type of education doesnt make it “second class.” I really hope they win the case but if they CH’V loose it, I am sure they are creative enough to come up with something that will work while keeping the socialist govt off their backs.
Isc, your comment is distasteful and bigoted. Where did you ‘buy’ your education?
For all the Modern fellows here: getting someplace in life really means advancing in Torah and Mitsvos, and not getting fancy careers and spending too much time on the French or learning, ch’sh, the works of some French menuvolim writers. If they are able to make a living with this mich secular educ. — it is enough.
5 – amen
8 – I’m not sure why you’re so preoccupied with the French… Explain to me how someone who can’t speak English, do math or perform anything resembling a marketable skill is going to make a living? They aren’t getting enough to make a living, and in the modern economy they really don’t have a future.