Many Jewish schools teach both strong Judaic and secular curricula. But mother Beatrice Weber says she’s forced to send her smart, curious son to his yeshiva despite all the shortcomings because it's mandated in her divorce agreement.
, or schools, that offer so little non-religious education that students get to high school without basic reading and math skills.
“That investigative report shocked a lot of people,” Weber says, “but not me and not any of the parents in the community. We know this.”Weber’s 9-year-old son started attending his yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — located a block away from Central United Talmudical Academy — at age 3, but didn’t start learning secular subjects until second grade.
“My son, who's a little bit of a space geek, raised his hand and was like, ‘No, that's not how it works,’” Weber says. “And the teacher was actually surprised and actually paid a lot of attention when my son explained it to him. And I was like, ‘Wasn't he angry that you disrespected him?’ He's like, ‘No, no, no. The teacher was very curious. He said he had never learned that before.
“I'm a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. That fear is always there, even though I know logically that the only way to improve something is to expose it,” she says. “I've written my own experiences of living in the community and leaving. So I know the value logically of exposing these kinds of stories, yet having it exposed felt really scary.”
She counters the argument that the right to religious freedom gives these schools the right to deny secular education.“[Yeshivas] have a right to teach their religious subjects, but I don't think that that gives them a right not to teach the academic subjects. Children should be able to graduate schools being able to know how to read and write,” she says. ”There is nothing in Judaism that would dictate that a child should not be able to do that.
“Recently, he has not been getting hit. And I think they know maybe that I speak up and that it would not be wise,” Weber says. “But he still sees it happening as recently as this year. He said there was a classmate taken to the front of the classroom [and] punched by the teacher. The principal was called in to hit him. I mean, there's no words.”
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