In the mid-1940s, Joel Teitelbaum, an eminent and charismatic rabbi, immigrated to the United States, colonizing a section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn for his Hasidic sect, the Satmar, its name taken from the Hungarian town of Szatmar, where Rabbi Teitelbaum had fought to resist the encroachments of a modernizing society.
Subsequent decades have seen virtually no retrenchment in the sect’s mistrust of the larger world.
Among the Satmar in Brooklyn, use of the internet is condemned and secular education is considered of little use. In recent years, though, it became the fashion among some Satmar women to pursue special-education degrees after high school, typically online or through religious colleges.
The women often go to work not in philosophically suspect places like Greenwich Village, but in schools within their community.
Now, even that minor advance has been rolled back; some Satmar leaders issued a decree proclaiming that the practice would no longer be tolerated.
A letter from the United Talmudical Academy, the governing body for a consortium of schools, meant for girls entering the 12th grade and their parents, stated that they “shouldn’t God forbid take a degree which is according to our sages, dangerous and damaging.”
The letter went on to say that girls shouldn’t learn college subjects and that those who refused to obey would be denied positions as teachers. Leaders, they said, had a responsibility to protect the religious educational system from outside influences.
The notion is not an invention of the Hasidim, Allan Nadler, the director of Jewish studies at Drew University and a scholar of Hasidic practice, explained. The Mishna, a multivolume compilation of Jewish law that predates the Talmud, contains a prohibition against “external books.” Still, Mr. Nadler maintained, the recent decree reflects what he has observed over the years as a deepening fear of wider society.
The Talmudical Academy did not return calls seeking comment.
A history of pandering to the ultra-Orthodox in Brooklyn goes back at least to the days of Mario M. Cuomo. Politicians who might otherwise feel free to lecture black and Hispanic communities on the importance of grit, self-reliance and the sacred path of higher learning express remarkably little outrage over the habits of a group that essentially enshrines its own dependency on the system.
According to a 2011 study by the UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish philanthropic organization, just 11 percent of Hasidic men and 6 percent of Hasidic women in and around New York City hold bachelor’s degrees, while the poverty rate among Hasidic households stands at 43 percent, nearly twice the figure citywide.
A reliance on public assistance is remarkably common among the Hasidim, explained Lani Santo, the executive director of Footsteps, an organization begun in 2003 to help those who decide to leave the ultra-Orthodox world. “Even if you want to be able to have a community that is maintaining its own traditions,” she told me, “you still need to be able to have the tools and skills to support your family.” Political leaders, beholden to the enormous voting bloc that the Hasidim, and especially the Satmar, provide, remain reluctant to say something so obvious.
The recent Satmar decree is more than a feminist issue; it is a humanist problem. Through lower grades and upper school, girls in the community typically wind up with a more secular education than boys because boys devote most of their time to Talmudic study. Women will typically have better command of English and math, Ms. Santo explained, and are able to get better-paying jobs after finishing school. When they may need to pull back after having children, their husbands, for whom college is deemed equally ill-advised, find themselves either not working at all because they are continuing their religious training or too poorly equipped to find remunerative work.
Many of them, Libelle Polaki, an exile from the ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, told me, will resort to selling things online, which must be regarded as its own kind of sacrilege given the prohibitions against certain technologies. At 28, Ms. Polaki expects to graduate from the Borough of Manhattan Community College in December.
This semester she is taking six classes and auditing two others. At a cafe in Williamsburg psychographically distant from the Williamsburg in which she spent part of her life, she spoke of the hard work it took to get where she is.
Having suffered through an arranged marriage, she said, she was forced to pay off her husband, with a sum of approximately $18,000, to get divorced; a philanthropist helped her come up with the money. She held several menial jobs after high school that made her miserable, one working for Satmar leaders doing secretarial work; one in a matzo factory; and another in a group home for adults with developmental disabilities, where she was fired, she told me, after reporting abuses by the staff.
“They didn’t teach us anything in high school so I didn’t know anything, no Shakespeare or anything like that, no science,” she said. “I felt like a loser and I felt I wanted more out of life.” Growing up she was told not to go to libraries but she sneaked away to them anyway and at home read anything she could, including cereal boxes and junk mail because there was little else. At 26, she got her high school equivalency diploma and began her college studies. Over the summer, she studied philosophy in Greece. Two of her grandparents speak to her; two don’t.
The friends she left behind, she said, are jealous of her freedom.
Ms. Polaki plans to apply to four-year colleges and hopes to attend an Ivy League school. Will anyone running for local office stand next to her for a photograph on a leafy New England campus?
The latest salvo in the New York Times’ one-sided campaign against traditional Jewish education comes in the form of a column by Ginia Bellafante that is one of the nastiest and most unfounded attacks on a Jewish group published by the Times in recent memory.
The Times columnist accuses Satmar Chassidim of being welfare sponges:
Politicians who might otherwise feel free to lecture black and Hispanic communities on the importance of grit, self-reliance and the sacred path of higher learning express remarkably little outrage over the habits of a group that essentially enshrines its own dependency on the system. According to a 2011 study by the UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish philanthropic organization, just 11 percent of Hasidic men and 6 percent of Hasidic women in and around New York City hold bachelor’s degrees, while the poverty rate among Hasidic households stands at 43 percent, nearly twice the figure citywide.
A reliance on public assistance is remarkably common among the Hasidim, explained Lani Santo, the executive director of Footsteps, an organization begun in 2003 to help those who decide to leave the ultra-Orthodox world.
This is problematic on at least two levels.
First, the hypocrisy and double standard of which the Times accuses the politicians applies just as equally to the Times. Times columnists feel free to accuse politicians of racism or callousness when the politicians deplore welfare dependency in the black or Hispanic community. But the Times columnists lead the charge against welfare when the targets are Chassidishe Jews. (The column doesn’t mention that many such Jews pay taxes to support public schools that they do not use.)
Second, the statistical basis on which the Times makes its argument is erroneous. The Times cites the 2011 UJA-Federation of New York study to claim that that “the poverty rate among Chassidishe households stands at 43 percent, nearly twice the figure citywide.” But the UJA-Federation study, as the first footnote in the poverty chapter makes clear, uses 150% of the federal poverty guideline to define “poor.” It’s an apples to oranges comparison; the UJA-Federation uses a different and far more expansive definition of poor than the one theTimes uses as a comparison.
The same UJA study that found the 43% “poverty” — actually, up to 150% of the federal definition — rate among Chassidishe Jews also found an even higher 71% poverty rate among elderly Russian-speakers and a 48% poverty rate among those with disabled people in the household. Yet there’s not a peep of complaint from theTimes columnist about welfare dependency in those communities. It’s almost enough to make a reader suspect that what the Times columnist really dislikes isn’t welfare dependency but religiosity, particularly when it is of the fervently Orthodox Jewish variety.
Likewise, a Times news article from 2011 reported that “Among Hispanic single mothers in the Bronx, the poverty rate was nearly 58 percent.” That’s using the federal definition, not the more expansive 150% of the federal poverty rate UJA-Federation definition. The Times columnist doesn’t mention that, perhaps because it would undercut her effort to portray Chassidishe Jews, or Satmars in particular, as especially shiftless.
The rest of this column is marred by similar tendentiousness and errors of judgment. The Times quotes one “exile from the ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn” complaining about her education: “They didn’t teach us anything in high school so I didn’t know anything, no Shakespeare or anything like that.” Nothing against Shakespeare, but how many Chassidishe Jews are going to become Shakespearean actors or English literature professors? The odds of professional success in such careers are extremely long even if one isn’t a Chassidishe Jew. The apparent success of the “exile” in finding her way to such material on her own itself undercuts the claim that the failure of her school or parents to force-feed it to her amounts to some kind of abuse or insuperable obstacle.
The Times column begins, “In the mid-1940s, Joel Teitelbaum, an eminent and charismatic rabbi, immigrated to the United States, colonizing a section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn for his Hasidic sect, the Satmar, its name taken from the Hungarian town of Szatmar, where Rabbi Teitelbaum had fought to resist the encroachments of a modernizing society. Subsequent decades have seen virtually no retrenchment in the sect’s mistrust of the larger world.”
Well, what possibly was happening in 1940s Hungary that might have engendered “mistrust” of “modernizing society”? The Times doesn’t say, in a remarkable exception to the newspaper’s usual post-Holocaust Holocaust obsession.
“Encroachments of a modernizing society” is Times-speak, an Orwellian euphemism for the Nazis who sought to exterminate Jewry — and who nearly succeeded in doing so in Europe. With their rockets and Zyklon B, the Nazis were plenty “modern” and knew all the science that the Times is complaining that the Chassidishe schools in New York don’t teach. But the Nazis, like this Times column, lacked any concept of the limits of modernity, or of the importance of traditional Judaism and its enduring values in understanding the proper and improper uses of science.
I’m not a Satmar. But on the basis of this particular piece of work — and, for that matter, the recent coverage of Jewish education — for closed-mindedness and ignorance, the Times metro section and its columnist are well down there below the worst that any Jewish religious school has to offer.