A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York’s Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve.
The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law.
And it’s a move that many Hasidic leaders and even critics of the yeshiva system doubted the state would ever make.
That’s partially because of the long and tangled process that the state created to penalize schools found to be breaking the law, which mandates that all children receive an adequate secular education, even in private schools.
Resisting outside oversight into religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community, which has long maintained a significant influence in local politics and tends to vote as a bloc.
The insular community’s yeshivas, which rely heavily on taxpayer dollars, teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day, and offer little instruction in English or math.
The two schools that the state is effectively closing are part of a larger group of yeshivas that have not made sufficient progress, said Rachel Connors, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. Most of those schools have not yet faced any consequences for failing to boost their secular education.
But the leaders of the two schools, Yeshiva Talmud Torah of Kasho and Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, which are housed in three locations in Williamsburg, refused even to meet with education officials to work on an improvement plan.
“In December 2024, the department wrote to noncompliant schools, inviting them to meet and urging them to re-engage in the process to avoid the consequences associated with final negative determinations,” Ms. Connors said in a statement. “Schools that did not re-engage have been deemed schools that do not provide compulsory education.”
The two yeshivas were part of an investigation into Hasidic schools that began after yeshiva graduates filed a complaint with the state in 2015, claiming that the education they had received had left them unprepared to navigate the world as adults.
When education officials in 2019 visited one of the Sopron locations, which is now effectively being shuttered, inspectors “did not observe any instruction, taught in English, in the core academic subjects of English, history, mathematics and science,” according to a report released by the city’s Education Department.
Spokespeople for a group that represents yeshivas did not respond to requests for comment. But an article published Friday in Yeshiva World News, a Hasidic news outlet, offered some insight into the community’s reaction.
“It is always wiser to make your case to government rather than to refuse to respond,” the editorial read. “That makes it seem like they had something to hide. The yeshivas should have demonstrated pride and confidence in their students.”
The editorial also noted that the yeshivas were not being judged on their curriculum or “approach to education.” Instead, their funding was being cut off because they had not engaged with the government.
Indeed, the state’s move, which was earlier reported by The Daily News and The Jerusalem Post and not publicized by the state’s Education Department, underscores how much some yeshivas have defied government efforts to bolster secular education.
Scrutiny of the schools ramped up following a 2022 New York Times investigation, which found that scores of all-boys Hasidic schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley did not provide a basic secular education despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding. The report also discovered that teachers in some yeshivas had used corporal punishment.
The following year, city and state education officials determined that 18 Hasidic yeshivas were not providing a basic nonreligious education.
The state, however, provided those schools with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to improving their secular studies.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, a longtime political ally of the Hasidic community, said that the city would defer to the state on this issue but otherwise declined to comment.
Adina Mermelstein Konikoff, the director of Yaffed, a group of former yeshiva students that supports secular education, said in a statement that she hoped the state’s move “serves as a wake-up call for other schools that continue to disregard essential academic standards.”
