By: Jared Evan

A small but growing community of religious Jews in Upstate New York is being unfairly targeted by The New York Times, as the publication continues its assault on Orthodox Jews

A recently published “hit-piece” is saying the fact that the few students who attend public school in Kiryas Joel are doing so in space leased from buildings two school board members own is a conflict of interest.

The New York Times goes on to claim that the entire Jewish community is a burden to the village at the same time they admit that the only students who do attend the public schools are those who need special services for disabilities, all others attend private Yeshivas.

Jay Root of The New York Times writes:

“Created a little over 30 years ago, the unique public school system immediately drew concerns that a school district created for members of a single faith could never separate itself from their religious institutions. Then, in 2009, New York auditors identified a glaring conflict of interest: Two of the school district’s board members had voted to use tens of millions of tax dollars to lease a building from a private religious school organization that they also helped run.”

The New York Times goes on to bash private, religious education by highlighting how New York State is specifically targeting school run by religious Jews. State law requires all private schools to provide an education comparable to what is in public schools.

The Kiryas Joel School District has released a response to the latest NY Times hit piece against Chassidim:

The story published today by the New York Times about the Kiryas Joel Union Free School District’s support of the village’s private yeshivas with public monies is colored and spun unfairly to convey a false narrative of a school board ignoring purported conflicts of interest and inappropriately funneling taxpayer money to religious organizations. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The District and its board of education work tirelessly to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations in all facets of its operations – programmatic, fiscal, and governance – and passes rigorous state and federal audits each year that substantiate these efforts.

The long-term leases the Times attacks in its article are for buildings solely used for our special needs students, and the leases were approved by the voters of Kiryas Joel and the Commissioner of Education. What’s more, the school district obtained independent appraisals as part of its process, and the facilities were leased at below market costs. Any improvements that we make to these facilities are approved by the State and they will benefit our students, and not our landlord.

Furthermore, the Times writes that millions of dollars flow into the religious schools, but ignores the fact that we – like all school districts – are required to equitably provide these funds for services to the at-risk nonpublic school students within our borders. We have no discretion to keep this money for our public school students and every federal dollar spent is approved by the NY State Education Department.

We explained all of this to the Times and spent countless hours educating its reporter about district operations and expenditures to provide it with a deeper understanding of our community, our legal obligations to the nonpublic schools located within the school district, and proper context for our leases. Unfortunately, this was ignored in favor of a story that is inaccurate, misleading, and we think dangerous, as it comes at a time when antisemitism and attacks on the Jewish community are at their highest level in decades.

The New York Times chose to malign our dedicated Board members, our experienced staff and our professional services. The public would have been better served by a story that helps it understand this unique and truly special school district and community, and celebrates the remarkable work being done here.”

This article is one of the latest in a continued effort to attack religious Jews by the far left publication who once were sympathetic to the mass murdering sociopath Pol Pot of Cambodia.

In 2022 the Times wrote several articles attacking Jewish Schools in NYC, TJV News picked the themes of the articles apart, which were written by Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal of the NYT

TJV previously reported:

For several years now, the New York Times has taken it upon itself to research the Chassidic yeshivas in New York, writing about how the schools are “failing by design”.  The Times has taken a handful of Hasidic schools as a sample, faulting the private schools overall for minimal time invested in secular studies. In their disparaging article Shapiro and Rosenthal state that the schools dedicate the majority of the day to religious studies, erroneously claiming this leaves the students ill equipped to find jobs and excel in society.

The Times also alleged that students are being “trapped” into dependency and joblessness, despite the fact that the government has endowed the schools with generous taxpayer funding.  The article says that the Chassidic boys schools collected roughly $1 billion in the past four years.  Even the Times conceded that that “the schools receive far less taxpayer money per pupil than public schools do”.

The article concluded that “students grow up and can barely support their own families”.  Still, as per the US Census Bureau data conducted this decade, the city’s greatest concentration of unemployment is by no means in Chassidic neighborhoods of New York City. Rather, such unemployment rates exist in districts 14, 15, 16, and 17 in the south and central West Bronx, and District 10 in northern Manhattan.

Now, the Times has reported that Chassidic schools are enjoying a windfall of government money that is earmarked for the needs of students who qualify as needing special education due to a variety of mental and physical disabilities.

Early this year the NYT again used another opportunity to attack practicing Jews, in regards to the YU controversy.

The NY Times essentially asserted that Yeshiva University assumed a devious posture by claiming that it is a secular institution of higher learning in order to collect $230 million in federal government funding in order to build and renovate its facilities and restructure its pre-existing debts. On the other hand,  the NYT also reported that Yeshiva University classified itself as a religious institution in order to argue before court why it had refused se to recognize a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer club on campus. The report claims that YU has said that because it is a religious institution, it is not in violate of New York City’s human rights law which would compel the university to grant recognition to such a club.

How many stories will be published this year attacking New York’s Orthodox and Ultra-religious populations?