If Jewish children were being denied a basic human right, like free expression or assembly, there would be an outcry from Jewish religious, communal, and philanthropic organizations. We would not sit idly by.

Yet, for decades, tens of thousands of boys in Hasidic Jewish families have gone to school and learned virtually nothing to prepare them to be economically self-sufficient or to have access to the broader world. Education is a human right.

These boys, whose first language is Yiddish, learn some English and arithmetic in elementary school, but even that stops in high school. Once they are in their teens, there is no English, no math, no science, no history, no physical education.

This situation is not only a moral failing, but a legal one too. The failure to teach these children secular knowledge is in violation of state and city educational guidelines.

The larger Jewish community has kept quiet about this scandal because it respected the traditions of the Hasidim, thought there was something noble in their quest to maintain their way of life, and figured that somehow they coped. After all, don’t they own B&H?

Politicians also kept quiet, but that had more to do with the political power of the Hasidim — they do, indeed, vote as a block. And they are growing at a rapid rate, especially in cities like New York.

But that is now changing, not because the Jewish leadership has awakened from its slumber, but because some of these children have grown up, moved away from the community, and become advocates for change.

Naftuli Moster, raised in the Belzer Hasidic community in Brooklyn, gives his own life as an example. “I grew up Hasidic and I have the scars to show for it, at least in terms of education.” His elementary-school education was typical of some 40,000 Hasidic boys in the New York area today. “We got 90 minutes of English and arithmetic four days a week,” he said. “And it came at the end of a long school day when no one took it seriously.”

Even that paltry amount of secular education came to a stop in high school, where religious studies took up the whole day, from 6:30 A.M. to 8 P.M. Moster didn’t even know what he didn’t know until he found himself in a dead-end job doing manual labor in a warehouse and started at a college program to advance himself. Words like “semester” and “credits” were alien to him. He never heard of a molecule. He didn’t know how to write an essay; he didn’t even know what an essay was.

“I realized that I was the victim of educational neglect,” he said.

Moster, who eventually got a bachelors degree in psychology from the College of Staten Island, still feels that he is hampered by “major, major educational gaps.” But he has turned his anger into advocacy. In 2012, he founded an organization called YAFFED. It stands for Young Advocates for Fair Education and is working on two fronts: to get Hasidic schools to voluntarily provide secular education and to get the city and state to enforce its own educational regulations.

Moster has become something of an expert on state and city law. He quotes a New York State law that requires all non-public schools to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools. The law specifies subjects such as English, math, reading, writing, music, art, geography, history, science, and physical education. None of these are offered in the boys’ Hasidic high schools. (The girls’ schools do, however, provide a limited amount of secular studies through high school.)

For his efforts, Moster, 32, and his organization have been demonized by the ultra-Orthodox community. In an article last year in Hamodia, an ultra-Orthodox newspaper, one rabbi, Avraham Y. Heschel, wrote about YAFFED: “Let there be no misunderstanding: The real goal and agenda of this group isn’t to improve the skills of yeshiva students. What they are doing is using a backdoor attempt to drive our youth away from Yiddishkeit through infiltrating and corrupting our chinuch [educational] system.”

YAFFED and its supporters, Heschel suggested, are rodfim, a rabbinic term for murderers who must be stopped before they do harm.

Professor Samuel Heilman, a CUNY sociologist and supporter of YAFFED, said in an interview that he was not surprised by the strong language. The Hasidic world, he said, “will fight YAFFED to the death because they know that once people learn that there are middle grounds, and that the outside culture has much to contribute to our lives that is good, their world will begin to crumble.”

YAFFED has tried to go around the leadership of the Hasidic community and reach out directly to parents who, they hope, will in turn pressure the leadership. They’ve done this by placing large billboards in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. One asks: “Is your son receiving instruction in English, math, science, history and geography? He should! Even if he is already in high school. Speak to his principal or school administrator today!”

Another billboard has a quote in Hebrew from the Talmud. It translates: “A man is required to teach his son a trade.” Then it says in English: “It is your mitzvah. It is the law.”

According to a census of Jewish schools released by the Avi Chai Foundation in 2013, there are nearly 80,000 children in Hasidic schools in New York City and its suburbs. Figuring that half of these are girls who get a secular education, the educational crisis affects some 40,000 boys.

In an interview, Moster noted that the ultra-Orthodox are “the fastest growing Jewish denomination” and then he quickly added, “the only growing Jewish denomination.” Projections based on a recent UJA-Federation survey data show that by 2030, roughly a third of school age children in Brooklyn will be Hasidic.

Giving those children an education, Moster said, is urgent. “Everything is at stake here,” he said. Moster comes from a large Hasidic family. He is the middle child in a family of 17. At the end of the interview, I asked him why he didn’t just leave the community behind and move on with his life.

He responded: “I always wish that 32 years ago someone said ‘enough is enough.’ I would have the tools and skills to pursue my dreams. I’ve got a ton of siblings, nieces and nephews. I cannot disappoint the children now in the system. I am hoping that 30 years from now they will have a chance.” ■

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Ari L. Goldman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is an editorial consultant for CONTACT. He is the author of four books, including The Search for God at Harvard and The Late Starters Orchestra.

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