Posted on 09/14/22
| News Source: Newsmax
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, on Wednesday rejected a New York Times report claiming that New York City's private Orthodox Jewish Schools are depriving their students of basic education while accepting $1 billion in public money, telling Newsmax that time spent in religious studies also gives students a strong educational foundation.
"The woke New York Times is out with another classic attack on religious values and religious education, this time targeting the Jewish community for doing Jewish education the way we have always done," Menken said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
The Times reported Sunday that even though the schools accept public funding, they remain unaccountable to outside oversight.
The article's writers, after a year of research including interviews with almost 300 people, translations of Yiddish-language documents, and the analysis of data on the Hasidic Jewish community's school, reported the institutions are "failing by design."
The schools focus on education in Jewish law, tradition, and prayer, conducting hours of Yiddish-language religious lessons but offer few lessons in traditional subjects like math or English and almost no lessons in science and history, failing mostly in the 100 schools for boys.
However, The Times reported that the boys' schools have collected more than $1 billion in government money over the past four years.
"There's a huge variety in the Jewish community with regards to how much time is spent on secular studies and how much time is spent on religious studies," Menken acknowledged. "But those religious studies give children backgrounds in economics and law and damages, which you simply don't find in other school systems. So the idea that these kids are not getting educated, that the people of the book are not actually interested in educating their kids, is extremely offensive."