Secular Reporter Participates in Yeshiva Spelling Bee, And Emerges Impressed

Boro Park – A journalist who has widely reported on Brooklyn politics for years paid a rare visit to one of the yeshivas sued by Yaffed for allegedly not providing a solid secular education — and emerged impressed by how the students aced a spelling bee.
Steven Witt, who runs the Kings County Politics news site, was invited by Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein to moderate a spelling bee at a Boro Park yeshiva. Students at the yeshiva, which was unnamed in the article, did very well, wrote Witt, a self-described supporter of militant secular groups.

“Yeshivas Remain Buoyant and Can Spell It as Well,” Witt headlined his article about his serving as a judge for the 16th annual spelling bee for third-, fourth, fifth and sixth graders at the yeshiva.
“This was no ordinary yeshiva,” he wrote. “It was one of the 28 Orthodox Jewish schools investigated by the City’s Department of Education (DOE) on the allegation that these schools were grossly denying students a secular education.”
Witt wrote that he generally supports the aims of the secular Jewish groups he mixes with, he does not like what he refers to as their “false narrative” on yeshivas.

“I drew the line on going after yeshivas,” he said, “because Moster, like many that turn away from any strict form from which they were raised, seemed more disgruntled than anything else to me. Additionally, although I always attended public schools, I attended an orthodox Hebrew School after regular school four days a week until I was bar mitzvah that was taught by local yeshiva students. And in my experience, some of the smartest people I know grew up attending yeshivas.”
“So while may in the local mainstream and political media picked up and continue to run with the narrative that many yeshivas are not providing solid secular education, I have always believed this is a false narrative that at best has become a naive reporter cause celebre, at worst a swipe at against the Hassidic community with anti-Semitic undertones.”

This is a sentiment widely felt in the Orthodox community, that the crusade against yeshivas stems from animus toward the Jewish religion and not how well they teach math and science. A public comment last summer on proposed regulations that would require over four hours of secular studies every day was inundated with letters in opposition. Of the 140,000 comments submitted to the state education department, about 95 percent were against the state interference.
The mainstream media is overwhelmingly negative on yeshivas, though few reporters have bothered to actually visit one for their reports.

“Given the widespread stereotypes in the mainstream press about our yeshivas,” Eichenstein said, “I thought it was important to bring an independent reporter with no predetermined bias of our yeshiva system. I was proud to bring Stephen Witt from King’s County Politics to see a yeshiva firsthand — spelling bees are a great opportunity for students to show off the first class English education being provided at their yeshivas.”

Witt says that the yeshiva’s secular studies principal, a yeshiva graduate who immigrated from Poland in 1996, told him that the yeshiva teaches what every other school does, including English and writing skills from letter writing to essays.
“We try to cover all the basics and some of the older grades do the STEM curriculum [science, technology, engineering and mathematics],” said the principal, adding that if a student excels in any single subject, they are given extracurricular learning on that subject.
Witt wrote how captivated he was when a fourth-grader correctly spelled “cantaloupe,” which he admitted would have “knocked him out.”

“And it would have been fifty-fifty if I would have spelled the words millisecond, deficiency and hemisphere correctly. To learn these words, perhaps I need to go back to grammar school,” he added. “Or maybe even sign up for a course at a local yeshiva.”

Photos by: Ben Kanter