Jewish State Senator Holds Budget Hostage Over Exemption For Yeshivas
As Albany scrambles to pass a New York State budget before the holiday, one State Senator is using his unusual influence to demand that religious yeshivas be exempt from state education standards.
The Daily News reported Friday that the demand by Senator Simcha Felder, who is key to the Republican’s control of the chamber, could derail the entire budget.
Felder, who is Orthodox, is demanding that yeshivas not be subject to the state-mandated standards for secular education to which all public and non-public schools are held. The activist group Yaffed has agitated for enforcement of the standards at Hasidic boys yeshivas in Brooklyn, some which it alleges fail to provide sufficient secular education to their students. At Yaffed’s urging, New York City’s Department of Education has pursued an investigation of the yeshivas.
Felder’s power play has drawn condemnation from across the state. In Newsday, the editorial board called his demand “outrageous.” “It’s enough to blow everything up,” one unnamed source told the Daily News.
“If anything, we should be fighting in the other direction,” Naftuli Moster, Yaffed’s leader, told the Daily News. “These yeshivas are getting millions of dollars of public money.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO