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A court ruling has transformed — and limited — the way New York state can regulate yeshivas
NEW YORK (JTA) — What should happen when a yeshiva does not teach its students the legally required amount of secular studies? And who should be held responsible: the school, or the parents who chose it?
Both of those questions were at the heart of a bombshell ruling in a New York state court last week that, if it stands, will transform how the state can regulate private schools. It also poses a challenge to advocates for increased secular education in yeshivas, who have spent years pushing the state to more strictly enforce its standards in schools.
It’s the latest major development in a years-long battle between an education department that seeks to compel secular education standards across private schools and haredi Orthodox yeshivas resisting coercion from the state.
In a trial that pitted several yeshivas and their advocates against the state’s education department, a judge in Albany ruled that the state no longer has the power to effectively force yeshivas to close for not teaching secular studies in a way that is “substantially equivalent” to education in public school. According to the ruling, state law says it’s the responsibility of parents, not schools, to ensure that children receive a “substantially equivalent” secular education.
But the court also ruled that the education requirements themselves still stand. The yeshivas and their supporters had taken the department to court, hoping that the judge would fully strike down the regulations that mandated secular education standards.
Both advocates and critics of the yeshivas are celebrating parts of the ruling and lamenting others. What’s clear is that the state’s mechanism for enforcing secular education standards in private schools will have to change, though what shape it will take remains to be seen.
“It highlights and it notes that the statute itself requires parents to ensure that their children receive a substantially equivalent education, but it doesn’t impose an obligation on the schools to provide that,” said Michael Helfand, a scholar of religious law and religious liberty at Pepperdine University, explaining the ruling. “If that’s the case, there’s no authority under the statute to close the school because the school failed to provide a ‘substantially equivalent’ education.”
The regulations at issue were approved in September, soon after The New York Times published the first in a series of articles investigating Hasidic yeshivas, reporting that a number of them received public funding but fell far short of secular education requirements. The yeshivas, and representatives of haredi Orthodox communities more broadly, have decried the articles as biased and inaccurate.
According to the new regulations, if yeshivas (or other private schools) did not provide a “substantially equivalent” secular education to their students, the state could compel parents to unenroll their children and place them in a school that meets state standards — effectively forcing the school to close.
The judge who wrote last week’s ruling, Christina Ryba, found “that certain portions of the New Regulations impose consequences and penalties upon yeshivas above and beyond that authorized” by law. Ryba wrote that the regulations exceed the state’s authority by forcing parents to withdraw their children.
She added that state law does not mandate that children must receive the requisite secular education “through merely one source of instruction provided at a single location.” She added that if children aren’t receiving the necessary instruction at yeshivas, they can still get it elsewhere, in some form of “supplemental instruction that specifically addresses any identified deficiencies.”
What that ruling means, Helfand said, is that the state will have to turn to other methods to enforce those standards, such as choosing to “tie particular requirements to the way in which schools receive funding.” The state could also investigate parents, not schools — which he described as a much more arduous undertaking.
“It would then have to slowly but surely make its way through each individual family or each individual child [and] ask questions about what they’re supplementing,” he said. “It’s very hard to see exactly how the New York State Education Department could, given this ruling, ensure that every child is receiving a basic education.”
For yeshivas and their advocates, he added, “It’s not the constitutional victory that I think some hoped for but it’s a very practical victory that in the end may stymie the state’s ability to actually impose significant regulation.”
That’s the way advocates of yeshivas — including parties to the petition — appear to be reading this ruling. A statement from Parents for Education and Religious Liberty in Schools, known as PEARLS, one of the petitioners, said the ruling gives “parents the right to send their children to the school of their choice. …In sum, it provides parents and parochial schools with both the autonomy and the protections that the regulations tried to strip away.”
Another advocate of yeshivas that was party to the case, the haredi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America, saw the ruling as “not the complete victory many were [praying] for,” according to a statement, because it didn’t strike down last year’s regulations entirely. But the group was grateful that Ryba did rule out “the egregious overreach the Regulations sought,” including the “prospect of forcibly shutting down schools.”
Rabbi Avi Shafran, Agudath Israel’s director of public affairs, told JTA that the organization was “obviously relieved” by the ruling but feels the battle isn’t over. At the beginning of the year, Agudath Israel launched a campaign called “Know Us” that aims to counter what it calls a “smear campaign” by The New York Times.
“But with elements out there bent on pressuring yeshivos to accept their own personal educational philosophy, we remain on the alert for any future attempts to limit yeshivos or parental autonomy,” Shafran wrote in an email.
While Agudath Israel may see the ruling as a partial victory, that doesn’t mean advocates for secular education necessarily see it as a total defeat. Young Advocates for Fair Education, known as YAFFED, which submitted an amicus brief to the court in support of the Department of Education, said in a press release that the ruling “is of grave concern to all parents with children in non-public schools.” Beatrice Weber, YAFFED’s executive director, said the ruling will require the group to shift its strategy, which has until now focused on compelling the schools to teach secular studies.
But she is heartened that the core requirement to provide a threshold level of secular studies still stands for parents — and she’s skeptical that haredi communities will take the risk of asking parents to violate that requirement en masse. In the end, she believes more yeshivas will, in fact, become “substantially equivalent” in order to remove that risk.
“This victory they’re celebrating is really putting them in this corner,” Weber said. “We’ll see what they decide to do but none of the claims of [the regulations] being a violation of religious freedom — none of that was accepted.”
Weber acknowledges that the burden for secular education has now shifted to parents, and “there’s not going to be someone knocking on every door” to make sure parents comply. But she noted that many haredi families interact with the state because they receive forms of public assistance, which she said could provide a built-in mechanism to pressure them to comply.
“Any time they touch the government it’s going to come up,” she said. “Many Hasidic families deal with government programs a lot — whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s food stamps. I can’t see community leaders saying, ‘Whatever, let the families figure it out.’”
A spokesperson for the state education department declined to say whether the state plans to appeal the ruling, or what it means for future oversight of yeshivas. But in a statement, the department said the ruling “validates the Department’s commitment to improving the educational experience of all students.”
The statement added: “We remain committed to ensuring students who attend school in settings consistent with their religious and cultural beliefs and values receive the education to which they are legally entitled.”
Whatever the future holds, Helfand says the ruling reflects a new way to read the law that, for years, has driven tensions between the state and yeshivas.
“I would have expected people reading the statute not to distinguish between whether ‘substantially equivalent’ is a parental obligation or a school obligation,” he said. “The fact that the court was able to slice the obligation in such a precise way — it’s something we haven’t seen before.”
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How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s
“I’ve always been a stranger,” Ido Fluk told me when I met him in a near-empty conference room in a sleek, Nordic-designed hotel in Berlin this past February. It was the afternoon after the Berlin Film Festival’s world premiere of the Israeli director’s German-language film, Köln 75, a kinetic behind-the-scenes look at Keith Jarrett’s famous live album, The Köln Concert. Jarrett improvised the hour-long set at the Cologne Opera House on Jan. 24, 1975, on a substandard piano — a beat-up baby grand rehearsal piano instead of the 10-foot-long Bösendorfer Imperial he’d been promised.
The film has grossed over a million dollars at the German box office — no mean feat for a domestic production — and was nominated for four Lola awards (Germany’s version of the Oscars) including Best Picture.
Fluk, 40ish, with tousled hair and a thick mustache, stubble and round, dark-framed glasses, had a peripatetic upbringing. Born in Tel Aviv, he was raised both there and in Paris, where his family relocated for five years during his childhood. Just shy of 20, he moved to New York City to study at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He returned to Israel to shoot his first feature film, Never Too Late (2011) about a young Israeli man who comes home after eight years in South America and takes a road trip in his 1985 Volvo through the country he left behind. It holds the unusual distinction of being the first crowd-funded Israeli film and won the main prize at the Fribourg Film Festival. Fluk shot his next film, The Ticket (2016), about a blind man who regains his vision, in Kingston, New York. Köln 75 was filmed largely on location in Cologne.
“I’ve always been, like, moving around. So for me, it’s very natural to go to a new country to make a film,” said Fluk. “I also think it’s the story of cinema a little bit these days where art house cinema in the States is kind of a dying breed. You see more and more filmmakers from the U.S. traveling to Europe.”
“And, you know,” he added, “it’s also kind of the story of Keith Jarrett in the 70s, which is that jazz musicians were losing their audiences in the States, and they started coming to Europe, because in Europe they still found an eager audience for their work. So I could identify with that, in a way.”
Fluk was wearing a black T-shirt for the British punk rock band Idles that showed a man in a balaclava posing with a birthday cake. The image was captioned, “JOY STILL AN ACT OF RESISTANCE.” Fluk has a musical background. When he moved to New York, he played bass for “all these punk bands that never made it.” One band that sort of did was Elephant Parade, a lo-fi indie outfit that he formed with his now-partner, Estelle Baruch. They played legendary venues and festivals like CBGB and South by Southwest and even opened for Beirut.
“I’m not a good musician by any means,” he said, “but it helps you understand just how difficult what Jarrett is doing. It’s such a feat, what this man was doing in the 70s, which means driving in this tiny car, and every night showing up at a new city and playing a new thing that nobody’s ever heard before. He doesn’t think about it. He just starts playing.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, the respect that Fluk has for Jarrett (a reclusive artist, now 80, who had nothing to do with the film), the director did not set out to make a conventional biopic. Instead, the narrative and emotional center of the film, which Fluk also wrote, is Vera Brandes, the 18-year-old self-made concert promoter who, 50 years ago, signed Jarrett for the gig, sold out the venue, and convinced the reluctant pianist to perform on a subpar keyboard for the 1400-strong crowd that packed into the Cologne Opera House for the 11:30 pm concert. (The late hour was due to a performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu earlier that evening, a wonderfully strange detail that makes it into the film).
“There are a lot of movies about music that tell you the same story. It’s about the artist. It’s about his rise. There’s some complication, then there’s a comeback, there’s a big show at the end. And here was a story about the woman behind the scenes. It wasn’t a story about the artist so much as about the promoter and the invisible people behind the artist. I thought that was really interesting and fresh,” Fluk said. At the start of the shoot, Fluk invited Brandes, now 69, to visit the set, an event that he recalled as inspiring for him and the film’s team.
“She’s like a punk rock goddess from the 70s who, like, changed the world and never got a proper thank you. This was an opportunity to shine a light on her, because however good Keith Jarrett is, no Vera Brandes, no ‘Cologne Concert.’ If Keith Jarrett had the perfect piano on stage that night, the album wouldn’t sound the way it sounds, and it wouldn’t be as special as it is,” he said.
Mala Emde, a 29-year-old German actress, plays Brandes as a spirited and determined young woman striking out on her own, using her charm, enthusiasm and tenacity to navigate (and often bluff her way through) an exciting adult world that she cannot wait to enter. Emde carries the film on her capable shoulders. Jarrett, performed with brittle world-weariness by the American actor John Magaro, is another standout.
Köln 75 was in pre-production for four years and Fluk used that time to learn German. “By the time we were shooting, I already understood German. Now I can read, I can understand – I don’t like speaking it because I sound like an idiot — but it was enough for me to hear actors improvise, which was really important for me in this film, because it’s a film about improvisation and it needed to feel free,” he said. He added that Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, about the birth of rave culture in late 1970s Manchester, was a key inspiration in terms of tone and energy, calling it “the spirit animal of this film.”
Fluk didn’t reveal too much about his upcoming projects, which include an HBO series based on the bestselling non-fiction book Empty Mansions and a legal thriller about the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which Fluk described as “a really beautiful script and really important story about American Jews and the way they were perceived in America.”
With so many stateside projects lined up, can we expect Fluk to film again in Europe or Israel in the future?
“If the story I want to tell is located there? Absolutely,” he said. “I am very agnostic about territory. I have a film, and the film says where it needs to be shot, then we go there and shoot it.”
Köln 75 begins its theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York on Oct. 17. (It opens a week later in Los Angeles).
The post How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s appeared first on The Forward.
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3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce
(JTA) — Israel has identified the remains of three more hostages following a second release by Hamas on Tuesday, bringing the number of deceased hostages in Gaza to 21.
But even as the conditions of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement were still being met, both President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that further fighting could be in the future if Hamas does not move forward with disarming — as footage from Gaza shows it is far from doing.
The three hostages whose remains were returned were Uriel Baruch, Eitan Levy and Tamir Nimrodi. Nimrodi’s death had not previously been confirmed, though Israeli authorities said there was “grave concern” about his condition. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said he had been abducted alive but was subsequently killed in an Israeli airstrike.
A fourth set of remains sent to Israel was not that of a hostage and likely came from a Gazan, officials said DNA analysis showed.
More remains could be released on Wednesday as Hamas faces calls to hold up its end of the deal struck last week, which required the return of all 48 Israeli hostages. All 20 living hostages and four deceased hostages were released on Monday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who pressed for the deal, called attention to Hamas’ delay in returning the deceased hostages in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. But he also said that the second phase of the ceasefire, in which a lasting peace and plan for Gaza’s future governance is supposed to be negotiated following the release of all hostages, was already underway.
“ALL TWENTY HOSTAGES ARE BACK AND FEELING AS GOOD AS CAN BE EXPECTED. A big burden has been lifted, but the job IS NOT DONE,” Trump wrote. “THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!”
Meanwhile, footage showed Hamas operatives emerging from hiding in Gaza and reasserting themselves in the enclave, including by executing those seen as having opposed Hamas during the war with Israel.
Trump’s peace proposal called for Hamas to disarm and not play a role in governing Gaza, but the group has not agreed to those terms. Trump said before traveling to Israel on Monday that Hamas had been given temporary approval to act as a police force in Gaza.
“Well, they are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he told reporters.
On Tuesday, he said the show of force “didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you,” because the group had targeted rivals “that were very bad.”
But both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that a long-term failure to demilitarize by Hamas could risk a return to fighting.
“They’re going to disarm, and because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. He was then pressed on how he knew the group would do something it has said it would not do.
“I don’t have to explain that to you, but if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. They know I’m not playing games,” Trump said. “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”
Netanyahu told CBS News that he understood Trump’s comments to be a version of the threats Trump made on social media that coincided with a ceasefire deal moving forward: Disarm or “all hell breaks loose,” Netanyahu said.
The Israeli prime minister said he hoped it would not come to that. “We agreed to give peace a chance,” Netanyahu said, adding, “I hope we can do this peacefully. We’re certainly ready to do so.”
The post 3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce
Israel has identified the remains of three more hostages following a second release by Hamas on Tuesday, bringing the number of deceased hostages in Gaza to 21.
But even as the conditions of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement were still being met, both President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that further fighting could be in the future if Hamas does not move forward with disarming — as footage from Gaza shows it is far from doing.
The three hostages whose remains were returned were Uriel Baruch, Eitan Levy and Tamir Nimrodi. Nimrodi’s death had not previously been confirmed, though Israeli authorities said there was “grave concern” about his condition. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said he had been abducted alive but was subsequently killed in an Israeli airstrike.
A fourth set of remains sent to Israel was not that of a hostage and likely came from a Gazan, officials said DNA analysis showed.
More remains could be released on Wednesday as Hamas faces calls to hold up its end of the deal struck last week, which required the return of all 48 Israeli hostages. All 20 living hostages and four deceased hostages were released on Monday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who pressed for the deal, called attention to Hamas’ delay in returning the deceased hostages in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. But he also said that the second phase of the ceasefire, in which a lasting peace and plan for Gaza’s future governance is supposed to be negotiated following the release of all hostages, was already underway.
“ALL TWENTY HOSTAGES ARE BACK AND FEELING AS GOOD AS CAN BE EXPECTED. A big burden has been lifted, but the job IS NOT DONE,” Trump wrote. “THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!”
Meanwhile, footage showed Hamas operatives emerging from hiding in Gaza and reasserting themselves in the enclave, including by executing those seen as having opposed Hamas during the war with Israel.
Trump’s peace proposal called for Hamas to disarm and not play a role in governing Gaza, but the group has not agreed to those terms. Trump said before traveling to Israel on Monday that Hamas had been given temporary approval to act as a police force in Gaza.
“Well, they are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he told reporters.
On Tuesday, he said the show of force “didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you,” because the group had targeted rivals “that were very bad.”
But both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that a long-term failure to demilitarize by Hamas could risk a return to fighting.
“They’re going to disarm, and because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. He was then pressed on how he knew the group would do something it has said it would not do.
“I don’t have to explain that to you, but if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. They know I’m not playing games,” Trump said. “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”
Netanyahu told CBS News that he understood Trump’s comments to be a version of the threats Trump made on social media that coincided with a ceasefire deal moving forward: Disarm or “all hell breaks loose,” Netanyahu said.
The Israeli prime minister said he hoped it would not come to that. “We agreed to give peace a chance,” Netanyahu said, adding, “I hope we can do this peacefully. We’re certainly ready to do so.”
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