Elected Officials Respond (or Don’t) to SED’s New Regulations of Yeshivas

By Yehudit Garmaise

“Inside of these yeshivas, we have young kids who are receiving educations that are promoting values of service and of family,” said US Rep Lee Zeldin, who visited today the Viznitz and Munkatch cheders in Monsey. 

“[Here] boys and girls learn how to live law-abiding lives, and it is important to get this leadership from an early age.”

While the State Education Department (SED) was busy issuing several versions of regulations for the state’s private schools, many elected officials in state government had countless opportunities “to speak up about everything that is great about yeshiva education,” said New York’s Republican candidate for governor. “But, unfortunately, too many people were silent.

“Gov. Hochul is one of them.”

While Gov. Hochul does not promote yeshivas to the SED, she also did not criticize them.

When speaking to Orthodox Jewish groups privately, Gov. Hochul tells them she supports their yeshivas. 

Perhaps trying to stay out of a hotly contested-issue publicly, the governor has said regulating private schools is the state education department’s responsibility and that the agency does not report to the governor.

As the governor of New York, however, Hochul “should have spoken up for what is right,” said Zeldin, whose mother taught fourth grade at a yeshiva.

“The reality is that no matter where our kids go to school, we should always be striving to improve the education for all students, but what we see with this substantial equivalency push targets a particular community, and it is wrong.”

“The [NYTimes’] rhetoric, the allegations, not telling the full story” are “unacceptable” and trying to cast the yeshiva experience in the worst light possible.

Members of the non-Jewish NYC press, who are curiously pressing politicians to come down hard on yeshivas to provide more English instruction, have dramatically increased their occasional questions about Chassidic yeshivas.

While running for mayor in January 2021, Eric Adams, who said he was impressed with yeshivas after touring several, told BoroPark24 that he supports parents’ choice and different learning methods in schooling.

Adams has also told Jewish communities that he appreciates that yeshivas graduate such law-abiding, peaceful citizens.

After the NYTimes Sunday story that promoted a particularly anti-yeshiva bias, Mayor Adams repeated what he has said in recent days, which is that he not going to make any decisions based on a news story. 

"I'm a trained investigator,” Mayor Adams said. “I'm going to go in and have an investigation and come out with facts.”

In an open letter to the SED, Agudath Israel wrote, “We cannot relinquish control of the yeshivas that are the essence of our people.

“We cannot surrender control of our curricula.”