Sunday, April 24, 2016
Hasidic teen risks shunning for schooling
Mendel Taub perched his pocket radio on a warehouse shelf as he began his 12-hour workday packing handfuls of hard candies into cardboard boxes. The volume was set just loud enough to hear Rush Limbaugh’s latest rant.
“Knowledge…is…power,” Taub, 16, said slowly, repeating the WABC radio tag line.
Though born in New York, he was illiterate in English. Desperate to expand beyond his native Yiddish, Taub secretly turned Limbaugh into a surrogate English teacher. That was five years ago.
What he is doing was (and still is) risky because of where he is doing it.
Taub is from New Square, an all-Hasidic village of 7,500 in Rockland County. The Skverer sect there is one of the most insular religious communities in the country. Its powerful grand rabbi (or rebbe) dictates nearly every aspect of his followers' lives. The secular world and its conduits — smart phones, televisions, Internet connections — are generally banned.
Taub dropped out of his yeshiva at age 15 without the ability to speak or read English fluently, subtract double digits or name the 50 states. Teachers and rabbis dismissed his questions about the fundamentals of his sect’s beliefs. When he persisted, he was disciplined.
“I realized I wasn’t getting an education, that nothing they taught me would ever come in handy in getting a career or bringing in money for my family,” he said. “I realized that Talmudic law wasn’t really going to help me get a job.”
So he convinced a peddler who mostly trafficked in watches and calculators in the village to sell him a radio.
“It went down like a drug deal, on a street corner, in the shadows,” he said.
If he were caught by religious authorities, he could ruin his chances of getting a desirable match in his sect's customary arranged marriages or risk becoming ostracized from everyone he knew.
At 16, after months of low-wage manual labor, he gathered the courage to secretly call the public school administration: “I said, ‘Hello ... public school ... Ramapo…?’"
He believes he reached an East Ramapo school administrator. “I said, ‘I’m a kid from New Square. I want a high school education. Can I come to school? What do I have to do?' They said, ‘You might be here the next 15 years because your English and math are like a first grader’s. Go to Rockland BOCES when you turn 17. You won’t need your parents’ permission. They’ll do the job,’” he said.
“At that point, all I wanted to do was learn English. I didn’t think I’d be able to master math, science or social studies. I was clueless. I didn’t know anything about anything,” Taub said, sitting in an ambulance where he works part-time for the Ramapo Valley Ambulance Corps.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/investigations/2016/04/20/east-ramapo-education/82519112/
“Knowledge…is…power,” Taub, 16, said slowly, repeating the WABC radio tag line.
Though born in New York, he was illiterate in English. Desperate to expand beyond his native Yiddish, Taub secretly turned Limbaugh into a surrogate English teacher. That was five years ago.
What he is doing was (and still is) risky because of where he is doing it.
Taub is from New Square, an all-Hasidic village of 7,500 in Rockland County. The Skverer sect there is one of the most insular religious communities in the country. Its powerful grand rabbi (or rebbe) dictates nearly every aspect of his followers' lives. The secular world and its conduits — smart phones, televisions, Internet connections — are generally banned.
Taub dropped out of his yeshiva at age 15 without the ability to speak or read English fluently, subtract double digits or name the 50 states. Teachers and rabbis dismissed his questions about the fundamentals of his sect’s beliefs. When he persisted, he was disciplined.
“I realized I wasn’t getting an education, that nothing they taught me would ever come in handy in getting a career or bringing in money for my family,” he said. “I realized that Talmudic law wasn’t really going to help me get a job.”
So he convinced a peddler who mostly trafficked in watches and calculators in the village to sell him a radio.
“It went down like a drug deal, on a street corner, in the shadows,” he said.
If he were caught by religious authorities, he could ruin his chances of getting a desirable match in his sect's customary arranged marriages or risk becoming ostracized from everyone he knew.
At 16, after months of low-wage manual labor, he gathered the courage to secretly call the public school administration: “I said, ‘Hello ... public school ... Ramapo…?’"
He believes he reached an East Ramapo school administrator. “I said, ‘I’m a kid from New Square. I want a high school education. Can I come to school? What do I have to do?' They said, ‘You might be here the next 15 years because your English and math are like a first grader’s. Go to Rockland BOCES when you turn 17. You won’t need your parents’ permission. They’ll do the job,’” he said.
“At that point, all I wanted to do was learn English. I didn’t think I’d be able to master math, science or social studies. I was clueless. I didn’t know anything about anything,” Taub said, sitting in an ambulance where he works part-time for the Ramapo Valley Ambulance Corps.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/investigations/2016/04/20/east-ramapo-education/82519112/
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