Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Manhattan’s Ramaz School Clarifies Advice on Concealing Kippahs

(JTA) — When Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the principal of Ramaz, an Orthodox day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, first heard about last week’s attack in the neighborhood on a Jewish couple by a mob bearing Palestinian flags, he had an instinctual response. Maybe the male students at his school should consider wearing baseball caps over their yarmulkes when wandering around the neighborhood, he thought.

So he dashed off an email to his head of school, Paul Shaviv, suggesting parents might want to consider talking to their kids about it.

Then Lookstein thought again and realized he “absolutely did not agree with that policy” he had just suggested.

“I think that is giving the lunatics and terrorists a real victory,” Lookstein told JTA on Tuesday.

“We have to stand up here in New York and say we are who we are, and this kind of behavior by people who try to terrorize others should never be allowed,” he said. “I grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, when Yorkville [part of the Upper East Side] was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. And our answer to anti-Semitism has to be that we stand up like exclamation points and not bend over like question marks.”

But Lookstein never relayed his second thoughts to Shaviv.

So when Shaviv sent a letter about school security shortly afterward to students, parents and faculty, many were startled to find in it a suggestion about concealing kippahs, which Shaviv attributed to Lookstein.

“The recent incident involving abuse and harassment of a couple in the neighborhood has aroused comment. This seems to have been – thankfully – an isolated incident,” the email said. “However, Rabbi Lookstein suggests that parents may consider advising their children to be discreet in wearing uncovered kippot, tzitzit, etc. It remains good advice not to walk around the streets displaying iPads or other ‘vulnerable’ items; not to text, or listen to music via ear buds while walking (distracting your attention from the surroundings), and under all circumstances being prudent and aware of personal space and personal safety.”

Contacted by JTA, Shaviv took pains to say the school wasn’t advocating that students conceal their kippahs or tuck the ritual fringes of their tzitzit so much as merely passing along Lookstein’s suggestion.

“The school is not suggesting it. We’re passing on a suggestion,” Shaviv said in an interview, noting that he had no intention of concealing his own yarmulke. “All we’re saying is it is something that some parents may wish to discuss with their kids – no more, no less.”

He added, “Rabbi Lookstein has now reconsidered and may not want to suggest that after all.”

Now, Lookstein says, his view is clear.

“We don’t want this to become Paris,” Lookstein said. “It’s our job to educate the public and the leadership of this country that we cannot allow what’s going on in Paris and London and Brussels to happen here.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.