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(JTA) — It wasn’t the yeshiva tuition bills that drove William Rapfogel to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.

On top of the $400,000-plus salary the agency was paying its disgraced CEO, the charity was also covering day school tuition for his three sons.

Yeshiva tuition is frequently cited as the single-greatest financial burden observant Jewish families face. In recent years, a movement of more affordable schools, like Bergen County’s Yeshivat He’Atid and Westchester County’s Westchester Torah Academy, has sprung up in response to the so-called “tuition crisis” and groups like the Orthodox Union have stepped up efforts to get the government to cover the secular part of the education at private schools.

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But that wasn’t something Rapfogel or his wife, Judy — New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s chief of staff — had to worry about. The New York Post’s Page Six reported earlier this week that Rapfogel’s contract included tuition for his kids. A Met Council employee familiar with the matter confirmed to JTA that Rapfogel received tuition reimbursements but declined to specify whether the organization covered the full bill or just a percentage of it. The employee noted that it is “not uncommon in certain charitable religious organizations for that to be negotiated” as part of a CEO’s compensation.

Assuming all three Rapfogel boys (the youngest is now in college) did 12 years of yeshiva, the family could easily have racked up more than $500,000 on Met Council’s tab. That’s enough to pay for almost 90,000 meals at Masbia, the network of kosher food kitchens Met Council supports.

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