A British community under threat from the State – Part 1
by Karen Harradine, TCW:
BRITAIN’S 80,000 ultra-orthodox Haredi Jewish community are facing an existential crisis and threat which cannot be overstated.
In March, the Times ran a damning ‘investigation’ into ‘Hasidic’ boys’ schools, more correctly known as yeshivas, claiming these schools left ‘Jewish pupils barely able to read or write English’. It gave such a distorted and biased account that, according to Rabbi Asher Gratt, a leading figure in the Haredi community, it could only be described as a direct attack on this community. He contacted TCW with his anxieties.
He told us that when he heard the Times’s article was to be published he wrote in advance to several of its staffers, including the education editor, offering to talk to them in his capacity as an experienced educator within the community. They ignored his emails and neither did they seek comments from anyone else credible within the community. If they had, they would have been able to address allegations of illiteracy and abuse in yeshivas rather than indulging in anti-Semitic tropes.
It was not long after that the Rabbi contacted TCW with his concerns about the impact that government plans for introducing controls on currently unregistered educational institutions – for so-called ‘missing children’ – would have on the yeshivas.
Under the proposed legislation currently going through parliament children in the many Haredi faith schools could become categorised as children missing education – their schools, no longer counting as independent schools, would be forced into either closing or come under the State system and losing their identity. This is because the government plans to change the definition of independent schools to exclude many such faith schools.
Why does the Rabbi fear this will happen to the Haredi schools in particular? The reason, he explained, is that their schools have already come in for what has seemed like a targeted attack as in the Times and elsewhere. Rabbi Gratt says that none of the journalists who have reported negatively on their schools have ever visited or checked for themselves whether their various accusations of educational neglect are true.
Furthermore, shortly after the condemnatory Times article appeared, attacks on Haredi Jews escalated. That two incidents, see here and here, occurred on the very day the article was published, was, Rabbi Gratt wrote in an email to TCW, both alarming and unexpected.
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