I recently was lucky enough to speak at the Freedom of Religion and Belief Summit. While the stage for us at Mavar, a charity providing confidential support for those exploring life outside their charedi communities, was much smaller than the one occupied by the Chief Rabbi and Foreign Secretary, it felt like an important statement. Freedom of religion is not just about the right to practice your faith, but the rights and responsibilities faith communities and their leaders must hold on those in their care.
Outside, there were protesters wearing yellow stars on their chests. These were emissaries from London’s charedi communities, evoking imagery from the Holocaust to defend the right to preserve their education system. While it was a coincidence that they demonstrated at the same moment as panellists inside discussed the impact that being denied education had on them, the juxtaposition was notable.
The Schools Bill, the source of the demonstrators’ incendiary yellow star display, will place some much needed regulation and stipulation on those testing the limits of the education system. It will bring yeshivot into the same regulatory system as independent schools, and adopt a requirement to show that those being home schooled in unregulated institutions are actually learning. The vociferous response from community leaders was given voice by Joe Mintz in this very paper, but not without several errors in the process.
The thinking goes that getting education ‘right’ is key to ensuring young charedi people live a life in line with their communities’ values. Education – alongside language, dress code and other informal structures – act as boundaries between charedim and their neighbours. However, there is no evidence to show that the current model is the only way to preserve a charedi way of life. Conserving an education system that separates need not create an education system that deprives young people of basic language and numeracy skills, and deprivation is indeed a reality that we must confront.
In Mintz’s article, there was a request for data, though his article was strikingly light on evidence. So let me oblige. London’s charedi communities are concentrated across two constituencies: Hackney North & Stoke Newington, and Tottenham. According to the National Literacy Trust, these constituencies rank among the bottom 10% in terms of literacy, and, according to Department of Work & Pensions statistics, in the top 5% for child poverty. Neither constituency are majority charedi, but one of the common threads dragging them away from the average is indisputably the prevalence of a community that struggles with providing an education that is fit for all.
Mavar has worked since 2013 to empower people raised in a charedi community who are looking to upskill themselves to achieve more than their upbringing prepared them for. Some of these people may identify as wishing to “leave” the charedi world, but many do not. Each person that joins Mavar has a unique story, but what the vast majority have in common is a clear, acute and immediate educational need. These are people who – whether they feel at home in a charedi community or not – have not received many of the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to cope independently in our society, nor the qualifications required for many dignified jobs.
While it is possible to “leave”, doing so comes with significant hardship. Parents often face drawn out and expensive court battles as they fight for their children to be allowed to access the education they missed out on themselves. Some parents lose access to their children during this process. Charedim navigating life outside their community have said they feel like refugees in their own country. It is impossible to expect anyone to undertake such a journey without considerable intervention from sympathetic individuals and dedicated organisations that can cope with the educational, economic, legal, and mental strain. When Mintz argues that leaving “shouldn’t be made easy”, he is explicitly welcoming the acute mental distress experienced every day by those trying to navigate a path different to what was expected of them in charedi communities.
In order to defend the right to miseducate, Mintz relies on precedent from the US Supreme Court. It is notable that even New York’s charedi communities do not rely on Wisconsin v Yoder to make their cases, as they cannot satisfy all its specific criteria. More significantly, though Americanisation of our political discourse can be debated another day, we can all agree that court cases settled 5,900km – and, crucially, a whole 18th century revolutionary war – away do not actually impact British law. At the same time as focusing on another country’s case law, Mintz may have forgotten to consult our own. In a 2005 Lords’ Appeals Court decision, Lord Nicholls highlighted that freedom of religion does not protect religious education from any limits in a case about corporal punishment. It is an issue that sadly persists in some charedi educational establishments, and answers the broader legal question: the right to practice religion does not extend to the right to harm children in the name of religion.
With arguments about the nature of religious freedom, it is easy to forget the human beings behind every case of educational deprivation. At the FoRB summit, those inside the hall heard Mavar’s members speaking about their painful experiences.. The community they were raised to rely on did not equip them to live a life they found meaningful. But the Schools Bill will not help these people. It comes too late for them, they support it in order to advocate for the countless children who will never leave the charedi community. Those children deserve dignity too. After all, we learn in Pirkei Avot that “one who is ignorant cannot be devout”. An education system that separates need not create an education system that deprives, and it is our responsibility to ensure that our fellow Jews can thrive in a life of their choosing.
Amos Schonfield is CEO of Mavar
