The City of Torah Gone Awry

R' Aharon Kotler, founder of BMG

Updated. (See below*)

Every time I hear a story like this, it shakes my faith in those who are supposedly the cream of the Torah world. I say this while still believing that essentially the founding ideals of that world are completely legitimate.

I am speaking about Lakewood, New Jersey, aptly nicknamed the Ir HaTorah - the city of Torah. I say ‘aptly’ because there is no other city like it anywhere in America. Nowhere is the depth and breath of the Torah more diligently studied L’Shma (for its own sake) than at BMG, the Yeshiva founded by Rav Aharon Kotler. Around which has grown an entire city where Torah study is king and everything else secondary. A city where most of those residents live their values as was demonstrated by a beautiful article in the New York Times a few years ago. In short Lakewood is a city that should be admired for what it has become.

Or should it?

Well, yes, it still should for all the above reasons. But along with the good has come some bad. Enough so that it may actually undermine all of the good that happens there. I say this with no malicious intent. (Although I am absolutely convinced that I will be accused of that by more than a few people.) I say it because I see a pattern of behavior by city activists (known as the Va’ad) who seem to have taken control of how that community is run and have decided what its values should be. With the apparent approval of the city’s rabbinic leadership – who have done little if anything to discourage this trend.

This was made clear again to me by a letter written by Yosef Shidler, one of Lakewood’s residents. It was published in Greater Lakewood – which appears to be a newspaper geared for the mainstream of the city.

Yosef Shidler is not a Lakewood basher. Far from it. That can be seen by the respectful way in which he writes his letter. Nonetheless, his experiences and observations are in my view a devastating indictment of that community and how their values have evolved. Which I believe was not necessarily the intent of BMG’s founder.

The events described are not new. This type of thing has been going on for years. And it was even addressed by some of the city’s rabbinic leaders (e.g. R’ Matisyahu Salomon) a few years ago. But the problems have only gotten worse. Here is an excerpt from that letter about his daughter’s school, Ateres Tziporah, which demonstrates this. 

(L)ast weekend…  without any warning at all, Ateres Tziporah was closed, supposedly because of financial issues.  It took a while to dig down deep enough to find out what had really happened and the truth was almost too crazy to believe. The school’s downfall had been orchestrated by those who were tasked with making sure that Lakewood remained aligned with Rav Aaron’s vision, which didn’t include a place like Ateres Tziporah which warmly welcomed every girl who wanted to learn.  I guess in their minds, it made sense. If there are no schools for the kids of non-BMG-type families, then they will have to pick up and move elsewhere, leaving Lakewood pristine and pure.

Ironically, while Ateres Tziporah was supposedly closed for lack of funding, those who were running the school turned down donations that would have covered the shortfalls, with previous funding commitments deliberately sabotaged. What terrible sin was it that Ateres Tziporah had committed to find itself in the crosshairs of the Vaad?  You better sit down for this one. It had made the apparently fatal error of welcoming every girl who wanted to learn and grow and succeed...

And yet, five weeks before the start of the new school year, 170 girls suddenly have no place to go in September.  Their parents will be forced to beg and pull any string they can so that their daughter can be squeezed into an already too full classroom. 

I get that there has been an unprecedented population explosion there. And that new schools that are being built are filled before they are completed. That leaves a lot of students out in the cold.  I understand that that schools must make gut wrenching decisions about who they will and will not except into their schools. If there isn’t enough room, what are they supposed to do?

But what happened here has nothing to do with that. It is an insidious attempt to redefine what the Torah world should look like… a cookie cutter look where every single member is a clone of every other that toes a very specific line not necessarily set by BMG’s founder. But is apparently approved of by his successor grandchildren. 

As BMG goes, so goes Lakewood. And city activists are not going to be distracted by anything that veers even slightly from their vision of what a city of Torah should look like.

Of course this is not the only problem Lakewood has. We know that there are over population problems, unscrupulous developers trying to accommodate them with cheap and ugly multi-unit housing without taking into account the necessary changes in infrastructure; or people looking to expand their community and way of life into neighboring communities who are fighting them; and the way sex abuse has been mishandled (as was the case a few years ago when one of BMG’s premier Talmidei Chachmaim was hounded out of town because of the way he ended up dealing with his son’s sexual molester).

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This is the dark side of Lakewood and it seems to be getting worse as community activists increasingly gain authoritarian - near Godlike control; with the tacit if not outright approval of the city’s rabbinic leaders; without the slightest concern about community input. (If one reads the authoritarian way a recent distribution of new rules were written, that is clearly the impression one will get.)

Mr. Shidler warns those activists that things are changing. There are now demographic changes that will force a change in how things are run there. But I’m not so sure about that. If those activists can so quickly shut down a school the way they did with impunity - without even a peep from the city’s rabbinic leadership, that malaise will not  change so easily. What may happen instead is that the influx of those new types of residents will slow down while those that are there may decide they have had enough and leave.

The saddest thing about all of this is that with the kind of exponential growth happening there combined with the willing (or unwilling) compliance of its residents, this will not only become the largest segment of the Orthodox world (with the exception of Chasidim) it will become the paradigm for all the other Charedi communities in cites all over America. In fact I think it is already happening.

*I received the following communication from someone who has a different version of events.  For the the sake of fairness and balance, I present it here.

The reason why Ateres Tziporah closed was due to lack of registration. For the upcoming year they have 6 children registered for Primary, 8 kids in first grade and 11 in second grade. In fact the reason no other school was taking Ateres Tziporah kids was because the community wanted it to stay open and other schools knew if they took in Ateres Tziporah students the schools would close. The Vaad tried to save the school, not shut it down. Now that the school has shut down, many of the parents are actually happy because they will be able to get their kids into other schools.