The last place you’d expect to find a group of Chasidim in their shtreimels and bekishes on Chol Hamo’ed Succot was on a protest outside Parliament. But the very fact that they took to the streets during the intermediate days of a festival shows how strongly felt was the cause: it is, one of the leaders of the action said, “an existential struggle”.
This month’s Succot outing was the latest in a series of demonstrations in Westminster against the government’s plans to regulate yeshivot, which have been included as part of the Schools Bill.
The demonstrators may gain temporary respite because the Bill is expected to be shelved any day and may already have been, had it not been for the latest spin of the prime ministerial merry go-round. New Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is the fifth to hold the post this year.
The Bill's likely suspension has nothing to do with the yeshivot, however: proposals to govern academies ran into controversy with those who believed they gave too much power to the Education Secretary, which led to a large section of the Bill being ditched earlier. Still,the educational press has suggested that the planned crackdown on unregistered institutions is likely to be re-introduced in spring and one peer who has closely followed discussions in the Lords told the JC that this part of the Bill will come back “at some point”.
The government is looking to close a loophole whereby institutions such as yeshivot that teach an exclusive religious curriculum do not count as schools under the current legal definition and therefore escape Ofsted scrutiny. An estimated 1,500 Strictly Orthodox teenagers of school age in Hackney — below the age of 16 — are thought to be enrolled in yeshivot where they pursue purely Jewish studies.
If the Schools Bill were passed, yeshivot would be treated as independent schools and required to teach some secular subjects, as well as relationships and sex education, including LGBT awareness. Ofsted would get new powers to investigate unregistered institutions and home-schooled children would have to be registered with the local authority.
For the protesters, the government’s plans represents undue state interference in the religious freedom they have traditionally enjoyed and a threat to their time-hallowed educational system. They draw on the example of the historic resistance of the famous Volozhyn Yeshivah in the 1890s, which closed rather than accept the demands of the Tsarist regime to increase its quota of secular studies.
For all the passions aroused in the battle over the yeshivot, it is one being waged predominantly by Stamford Hill. Elsewhere in the Charedi community, in North-West London, Manchester and Gateshead, boys mostly go to school to at least year 10 before heading to yeshivah— although the LGBT requirements remain a sticking point and continue to be widely defied by schools.
Even within Stamford Hill, the protest campaign has largely been orchestrated by more conservative factions, rallied by the redoubtable centenarian yeshivah head, Rabbi Elyakim Schlesinger. A broader coalition of local yeshivah heads has preferred to lobby behind the scenes rather than take placards into the public square.
In a letter to the then Prime Minister Liz Truss, Rabbi Schlesinger wrote, “Do we remain a globally respected, free and leading democracy, which grants its citizens freedom of choice with dignity and respect, or will we be led by a small yet very vocal of local minority group of antisemitic, intolerant people who are driven by hatred and seek to sow division into our cohesive society?”
Rabbi Schlesinger could have hardly foreseen the irony of referring to Britain as “globally respected” during Liz Truss’s ill-fated and short-lived tenure. And few in the wider Jewish community would go along with his belief that the Bill is being driven by antisemitism.
But while the Bill has been supported by the counter-extremism charity Nahamu, most of the organised Jewish community has watched quietly from the sidelines.
Defenders of the yeshivot argue that their educational system produces well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens, whose wits have been sharpened by years immersed in the classical education of Talmud; and that their youth can always take career-oriented training after they emerge from yeshivah.They will also point to efforts to improve secular tuition in strictly Orthodox primary schools in recent years (efforts, it has to be said, that have followed pressure from Ofsted).
Stamford Hill’s position remains “no compromise”: their sacred institutions must be protected from secular intrusion. But some believe that, if forced by law, some groups might come round to lessons in basic subjects such as maths and English as long as the main yeshivah curriculum remained intact. The Belz school in Stamford Hill, Machzikei Hadass, is already registered to take boys up to 16 — although Belz are generally thought of as more accommodating in these areas than other Chasidic sects.
However, the demands of relationships and sex education remain a red line that only strengthens the resolve not to bow to the state. So far there has been no indication the government is willing to budge. As one senior education official in a council explained it to me, teaching about LGBT identity is a matter of safeguarding so that children who might experience feelings of difference might receive sympathetic treatment. Yet it could be argued that compelling Charedi schools to raise this in the classroom might not be the best way to support such children within those communities.
If regulation does come in, what next? Some in Stamford Hill might carry out their threat to send their children to be educated abroad or even up sticks themselves. Some may opt for home-schooling for part of the day, while their children continued to attend yeshivot as “part-time” centres — though the Bill would grant the authorities power to act further to prevent evasion of regulation. It won’t be a surprise if the culture clash eventually ends up in the courts.
