BROOKLYN (VINnews) — A Jewish leader has penned an op-ed on a local news site, “Brooklyn Paper”, blasting the NY Times’ months-long crusade against Yeshivos.
Join our WhatsApp groupIn an op-ed entitled “Stop the unfair campaign against yeshivos”, Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council, expressed his “pain and anguish” that a “paper of record can lob such hate-bombs in the 21st century and get next to no response outside the Orthodox community.”
He said that the Times got it “utterly, hatefully and painfully wrong”, and that the Jewish People in fact “invented the concept of secular education” over two centuries ago.
Greenstein wrote: ”One thing is a constant among us Boro Parkers — an uncompromising devotion to a traditional Jewish education. Our yeshivas are the crown jewels of our community.”
He added, “The New York Times has placed a target squarely on the back of our yeshivos…If it were some white supremacist website lobbing such charges, it would be labeled – and rightly so – as antisemitic.”
Greenstein continued, “We, the Jewish People, invented the concept of secular education 2,500 years ago.”
“The Times cherry picks selected statistics and relies on a handful of discontents who left the Orthodox community to make its “case”…to describe it as misleading would be an understatement.”
The op-ed concluded: “…the relentless attacks in print on us is rightfully feared by many of us to only encourage more physical attacks on visibly Orthodox Jews. In the world’s most tolerant and liberal city, how can this stand unchallenged?”