A group of Roshei Yeshiva have met to discuss a new seminar in Jerusalem for young women that is opening up. This is considered a seminary for "modern Haredi" women and they offer more diverse, and higher level, academic studies than your average Beis Yaakov.

The conclusion of the meeting was to warn people to stay away fro this seminary and to not send their daughters to it. They say the people running it are not compatible with the spirit of Beis Yaakov and sending one's daughters to it is putting them at educational risk.
source: Actualic

caveat: I don't personally know anything about this school, Bnos Chayil.

I don't understand what the rabbonim want - on the one hand, they will not accept girls from more modern families into the mainstream schools and instead they tell such epople to open a more modern school appropriate for them, while on the other hand they then come out in opposition to schools that are opened up for more modern students.

From the other perspective, maybe the people behind such schools should not call them Beis Yaakov. Start a different organization, a different chain of schools, and they will have no connection to the Beis Yaakov organization. Maybe then the rabbonim won't bother opposing them.

I understand everyone in the Haredi community wants to send their daughters to Beis Yaakov, as we tend to think that is the only kosher school for Haredi girls, and they do consider themselves Haredi, even if a bit more modern or more culturally Israeli. If they called the school something else, parents might hesitate before sending their daughters. Beis Yaakov has done a great job marketing itself as THE school for the frum girl (and in Israel specifically for the Haredi girl), and it will be difficult to supplant that with another chain of schools, but perhaps that is what needs to be done.

For some reason, instead of just fighting about the issues, when frum people fight it almost always becomes an issue of who is frummer than the other. it almost never matters what they are actually fighting about.

I remember 13 years ago, when we first moved to Bet Shemesh, we were registering our kids for schools and gans. I remember that we registered a child at a gan run by Bais Yaakov. The popular gan among the Litvishe community was the growing chain of nursery classes administered by Eitz HaDaas, but we chose to send this kid to the Bais Yaakov gan.

Nowadays, there is more freedom of choice, meaning less pressure from external forces, as things are pretty set - no single individual choice makes a big difference to any institution or to the neighborhood balance, in general. Back then, however, each school, each institution, fought for each kid, as each kid made a big difference in numbers and balance. The schools put lots of pressure on parents, such as forcing all kids in a family to go to one school, or where the family davened, and in other ways.

Anyways, so we registered our kid in Bais Yaakov gan. Shortly thereafter we received a phone call about our decision. The person who called, the head of an institution we were registering other children in, tried to convince us to send our children to Eitz HaDaas instead of Bais Yaakov. he did not threaten us or say that he would not accept our kids if we did not change our registration, but he did try to pressure us to send to Eitz HaDaas. When we weren't agreeing to make the change, he pulled out his frum argument. Don't send to Bais Yaakov because their hashkafot are different than ours, they are Hassidic rather than litvishe. It is a bad decision, you will all be messed up by sending there. I don't remember the exact words, but they made it clear that because Bais Yaakov is hassidic rather than litvishe, we were making a bad decision.

At the time I thought that was the most ridiculous thing they could argue. I responded that it was ridiculous, as Bais Yaakov schools all over the world are where frum families raise their children and there is no difference between hassidic or litvishe in that regard. Of course there are some schools that cater to a specifically hassidic, but that is not the case here, and I find it ridiculous that you would say, so i told him, that  Bais Yaakov is teaching the wrong hashkafa and is not an appropriate place where we should send our child.  As well, after nursery school, all the local girls in the system go to the Bais Yaakov day school anyway, so in gan Bais Yaakov is no good but from 1st to 8th grade it is fine?

We chose to stay with our decision and not change it due to their pressure. As a matter of fact, their pressure made us more resolute. I hate when people argue stupid things, using frum arguments that make no sense. he could have shown us how their education was better, their staff was better, their administration more efficient, or whatever. the frum argument really upset me.

it looks like nothing has changed. Bais Yaakov and Eitz HaDaas are still at it, as competitors often will be, and they are still throwing the frum argument around. I dont know why frum people, frum organizations, cannot just accept that other people are equally frum, and decisions should be made based on the issues.

Bechadrei is reporting on an argument between, that's right, Bais Yaakov and Eitz HaDaas, and in the end it comes down to the frum argument.

In Jerusalem there was a lot of confusion around the afternoon day care programs. In Bet Shemesh as well, and the issues are still ongoing, but back to the story. A number of schools chose not to open the day care centers this year. They claim not enough children registered, though I think it has more to do with budgetary issues - the Ministry of Education changed how the afternoon day care system works, and how the subsidies are given, and there is a lot of unclarity. Schools are worried the care will be too expensive and parents wont pay, parents dont know if they will qualify under the new rules and if the day care will therefore be too expensive and worthwhile.

So, some schools are just not bothering to open the afternoon day care programs. That eaves some parents in a bind, as they must work or be otherwise engaged in the afternoons and have to find a program for the younger kids that get out early. Some parents, in this story, chose to cross-institutionalize their kids - meaning even if they send to Bais Yaakov schools, they tried to register the kids in Eitz Hadaas afternoon programs, or vice versa, as relevant.

It turns out that Eitz haDaas rejected the applications of kids who were coming from Bais Yaakov morning programs. The excuse from Eitz HaDaas management was that "Eitz haDaas cannot accept children from other institutions, especially not from Bais Yaakov as those children ruin the other girls."

If they had just said the first half of the statement, it would be understadable, if not nice. So they dont want to deal with kids from other institutions, if they accept from this, they have to accept from the other, etc. It would be not nice, but understandable enough. Adding the second half of the excuse, saying Bais Yaakov girls ruin the Eitz haDaas kids, as is Bais yaakov girls are all bummy and on the way to being off the derech, was just too much.

Funnily enough, some of the parents from bais Yaakov chose to move their kids over to Eitz haDaas schools just because of the afternoon day care issue. These parents were surprised to discover, so they said to Bechadrei, that the afternoon Eitz haDaas programs were mixed programs with both boys and girls. How dare they tell us such hypocrisy that bais Yaakov is not frum enough, when they are running programs that are mixed-gender.

So the issues are actually irrelevant, it is just a matter of who screams louder the claim to be frummer.

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The suggestion that the fight over the OROT girls school building could have been simply solved by switching the girls and boys locations, so as to not have a girls school so close to a haredi neighborhood is absolutely ridiculous.

Besides for the fact that there was never such an agreement; the VAAD denies it, the city has not produced any such agreement, the Ministry of Education has said they built it for OROT girls, the mayor has been quoted by someone who spoke to him in May 2010 saying that it will be OROT girls (well after he is now claiming there was an agreement). Besides for all that, the suggestion that such an agreement would solve the problem is a red herring.

Do haredi neighborhoods not have girl schools located within? Do haredi neighborhoods send their girls to learn on the outskirts of the city? in the fields? Do they not have their own bais yaakovs? their own seminaries? their own girl schools under any other name? This applies to the entire spectrum of haredi, from the most chardal to the most extreme kannoish.

To suggest that it is a problem to have a girls school so close to a haredi neighborhood is so stupid it is almost insulting.

The issue is control. They want the building for themselves, but even more so they want to exert their control. And if the mayor thinks that such a silly agreement will solve the problem, he is giving them the control they are looking for.

Quote Of The Day

There is no need to be frummer than Bais Yaakov.

  --- Rav Ahron Leib Shteinman

Rav Shteinman said this, reportedly, in response to a group of parents in Jerusalem who decided that the Bais Yaakov school was spiritually not good enough for their daughters. they worked to establish a private school that would be even more exclusive with the teachers and students hand-selected. They then went to Rav Shteinman to receive his approval and bracha. To their surprise, after initially showing interest and then hearing the details, Rav Shteinman told them to scrap the idea.

Rav Shteinman said "there is no need to be more frum than Bais Yaakov. The Bais Yaakov schools are excellent, and there are a number of reasons why setting up this new school is a bad idea. Parents have to realize that when children grow up disconnected from their friends, it can be destructive for the rest of the child's life." (source: Kikar)

A friend pointed out something to me last night, and it made me think and extended his thought...

He pointed out to me (thanks T for the insight) that the whole purpose of the hassidic movement started specifically to bring the simple, unconnected people, the ones who don't have the strong Torah background and ability, to serve Hashem b'simcha and effect that even the "weaker elements" can serve hashem as well as anybody else, even if by focusing on other methods of ruchniyus and kedusha...

Yet we see nowadays, many of the hassidic sects (not all) are very limiting. In the situation of Emannuel it doesn't really matter, for the purpose of this thought, whether the reason the Slonimers are rejecting the girls from the Sephardic track because they are Sephardic or because they are "less religious". The whole raison d'etre of the hassidic movement is to bring the weaker elements (and I am not saying sephardim are weaker elements -my personal opinion is just the opposite - but in Emannuel and other places they are so treated) forward, to attract the "hamon am", to deal with the "amcha" and raise them up. The hassidic attitude today, by large (with exception, is a total rejection of their raison d'etre. They have made themselves into elite groups that reject anybody they consider not at least on their level. That is the opposite of the purpose of the hassidic movement.

Another player involved here is the Bais Yaakov school movement. The purpose it was created for was to "save" yiddishe neshamos from being lost in a world in which even the girls needed to be educated. Without a high quality frum education, the girls would have gone to be educated elsewhere...The Bais Yaakov movement became part of the larger frum educational system in which all over the world was mostly concerned with giving a frum education to any child willing to get one.

Any child that would be registered in a religious school would be a source of immense joy to the Jewish community and was considered a success and a genuine salvation of a Jewish neshama.

How did it get to be that nowadays our school system is more one of rejection, and it doesn't matter whether the rejection in Emannuel was because they are Sephardim or because they are less religious, than of acceptance and teaching?

We have turned on ourselves, and we have failed in our purpose, if this is what we have become.

Is it perhaps advancement and progress? In a world that had few frum people, and the risk of losing the next generations was so great, they were overjoyed by anybody who chose to be educated in a frum school. Perhaps that was appropriate for the world back then, but it is considered progress today that we have advanced past that stage - the frum community has grown by leaps and bounds. We no longer need to save the "weaker element" because we have enough of our own. Nowadays, perhaps, we can afford to, because our community has grown so much, be more concerned with improving ourselves, making ourselves more and more frum, teaching more strict adherence and higher levels of being religious internally rather than being concerned with saving each and every young child possible and bringing them into our system.

That would be a progress that is not being true to one's purpose. To me that is not progress, but failure.

There is a story that has ben simmering in Bet Shemesh for a few weeks now. A couple of weeks ago it even made the national scene with a half hour radio talk show dedicated to this situation - racism in the school, using the Bet Shemesh case as its main point of discussion. The local papers have also written about it a couple of times.

Basically a number of families tried to get their daughters into a certain Bais Yaakov school. The school refused, ostensibly because they are sfardi and this school is ashkenazy.

5 girls were left out of school while their parents fought.

4 of the girls ended up getting into a school, as the parents filed a complaint and the Ministry of Education forced the school to take them, as per the law. the fifth girl was out of luck as there was not a place for her, physically. Her fight continued.

the local school - in her neighborhood - being private could not be forced to accept her, so they went to another school and tried.
They then fought to get in to another Chinuch Atzmai school in another neighborhood, and ended up getting the support of Rav Shteinman who told the school to accept this families daughter, along with the law forcing the school to accept the girl.

The school and parents committee rallied against the girl, insisting she not be allowed in. The local Rav who is involved in the school called in the parents and accused them of being mosrim, as they had gone to the secular authorities and ratted them out, and that if they would be forced to take in their girl, they would have the girls excommunicate this daughter and make her life miserable.
The courts then forced the school to accept her, and the girls were forced to strike and refuse to go to class (I saw a blurb yesterday in Haaretz that the Court said the strike has to end and the girls have to go back to class).

1. I don't know for sure the issue is racism against sfardim, though it might be. It also might be that this school is not the right place for this girl. Maybe she is not at the same level - educationally or socially/spiritually, and therefore they oppose taking her. Just because the fight has been branded as racism doesn't make it so (but it might be).
2. I still don't understand why sfardim insist on going to ashkenazy schools. In a perfect world it should not make a difference. All the girls are the same anyway, and it really doesn't matter if one is sfardi and one is ashkenazy, and they should be accepted based on real criteria and not based on whether their grandparents came from Morocco or Poland. But the fact is the school put up a fight, for whatever reason. So why fight and insist on going there? Why not go to a different school? perhaps a sfardi school? Or find a different ashkenazy school that will be more accepting? I am not justifying the schools possibly racist discrimination, but why should the girl have to suffer just because the parents want to feel better about themselves as if they are ashkenazy (though I dont know why that makes a sfardi feel better). There are plenty of other schools, and this one is already not in their neighborhood, so I don't know why they did not just go find a different school.
3. Once again we see that the gedolim are only listened to when convenient, and again it is by the most religious of groups in the area (not the more "modernishe" that always get accused of not listening to the gedolim). Rav Shteinman said to resolve the case and accept the girl, yet they still refused to do so.
   
4. The response of the school, parents and rav seems inappropriate. if forced by the courts to accept the girl, just do it graciously. Why threaten? Why strike against the girl? Even if the family was wrong, and I am not saying they were nor am I saying the schools refusal was wrong, still, the girl did not do anything wrong to be deserving of excommunication and isolation. She did nothing wrong to deserve being shamed by the girls protesting against her (obviously they only did it because their parents told them to, and they were told by the rav and parents committee). Find a way to punish the parents if necessary, but to destroy the girl like that seems totally inappropriate and wrong.

I will also point out that while Bais Yaakov's and other haredi schools are notorious for using race as a factor in acceptance or refusal into their schools, they are not alone in this. Many schools do it - recently a Dati Leumi school in Petach Tikva made the national news in their refusal to accept some Ethiopian kids, for example.

I just read an article last night that was shocking to me. I was wondering if anybody else had heard such a thing before.

NRG posted an article about the 93 Beis Yaakov girls who committed suicide rather than let the Nazi soldiers defile them.

The article describes how the incident depicting gevurah, purity and tzniyus came to be known - via a letter that was somehow smuggled out of the ghetto and mailed to rabbonim in NY describing the events and requesting that this group of women/girls be davened for and remembered.

The story has gone on to become famous, as articles, books, poems, liturgical prayers, conferences, etc. have been held focusing on this story.

Holocaust researchers have investigated the story and come to the conclusion that it is a piece of fiction - it never happened.

They base the conclusion on lack of any evidence of it ever happening, along with a number of questions they have been unable to answer that put the whole story in doubt.

Questions such as:
How did the letter get out of a closed room in a closed ghetto and end up by rabbonim in NY?
How did they get hold of so much poison - enough for so many people?
How did none of the survivors from the area know about such a story that happened in such a small ghetto?
Why was the letter written in a Hungarian style of Yiddish, when it supposedly came out of Poland?
Just the sheer number - 93 - puts the whole story in doubt. How could this have happened to such a large group and go unknown?
Even from the side of the nazis it does not make sense - While in private with an individual perhaps a Nazi soldier would have raped her and broken the racial laws, but so many soldiers with such a large group of women? Such things were unheard of.

The conclusion of the researchers is that this is a made up story.

This shocked me. Have you heard of this before? Did it really not happen?

Here is an interesting post for you... check out why Shoshana prefers not want to work within the Bais Yaakov system...

Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein has posted a good article on Cross Currents questioning whether the recent "Bais Yaakov edicts" coming from the gedolim in Israel are appropriate for the Jewish community in America or not.