Tuesday, February 21, 2023
New York Times takes heat for its latest report on Hasidic schools: 'Misleading and dangerous'
Leaders of a Hasidic village in upstate New York slammed the New York Times on Monday for publishing a report on their community that they characterized as "false, misleading and dangerous" at a time when antisemitism is on the rise.
The New York Times published a series of investigative stories starting in September 2022 about Orthodox Boys schools, also known as yeshivas, particularly singling out the Hasidic community — a smaller group that falls under the Orthodox Jewish umbrella.
Activist groups and members of the Hasidic community widely denounced the Times' reporting at the time, accusing the paper of publishing "politicized hit pieces" as part of a demonizing "crusade" against Orthodox Jews.
On Monday, The Times published another report on the Hasidic community, this time about a small tight-knit village in upstate New York called Kiryas Joel. The Times report focuses on school-related payments made by the Kiryas Joel school district to the United Talmudical Academy (U.T.A.) of Kiryas Joel. The district was created to serve Hasidic children with disabilities, the Times reports, voicing concerns that a district "created for members of a single faith could never separate itself from their religious institutions."
The Times goes on to accuse the district of conflict-of-interest payments, reporting that auditors discovered 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."
"Since then, the conflicts have grown, a New York Times examination has found, with millions in public education dollars continuing to flow into the same religious school organization and its affiliates," The Times writes.
Citing "thousands of pages of public records," the Times reported that the small public school district is paying more than $2.4 million a year for building leases to companies affiliated with the village's religious private school organization, the United Talmudical Academy of Kiryas Joel, which provides schooling for most of the children in Kiryas Joel.
Kiryas Joel superintendent Joel Petlin pushed back against the Times' reporting in a statement Monday, calling the allegations "colored and spun unfairly to convey a false narrative of a school board ignoring purported conflicts of interests and inappropriately funneling taxpayer money to religious organizations."
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