From The Jewish Week:

A month after talk-show diva Oprah highlighted the warm and fuzzy side of Chabad Crown Heights on her new show, the rebbe's neighborhood is back in this news, this time thanks to a girls' school's Facebook crackdown.

The titillating combo of Internet, teenage girls, chasidic Jews and rabbis railing against "immodesty" has been impossible for the media — both Jewish and mainstream — to resist since officials at Beis Rivkah ordered students to close their Facebook accounts and fork over a $100 fine (which apparently will be returned at the end of the school year) or face expulsion.

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From The Jewish Week:

I recently sat in on a sex education course at an Orthodox high school. The class was for seniors, the first one they had been offered on the subject; they were understandably full of questions. I realized, based upon the nature of their questions, how vital this course is.

If you search on the Web for an Orthodox approach to sex education, one of the main responses goes like this: "Education teaches people how to live. If you are educated about sex, you begin to live with sex. This is not a theory. This is fact... There is an accepted view within Jewish orthodoxy that sex education should be taught when people are ready to have sex. When adults are ready to get married, they are ready to learn about sex."

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From The Jewish Week:

No one standing outside Yeshivas Ohev Shalom would peg it as an educational technology trendsetter. This tiny, fervently Orthodox high school is housed in a rundown synagogue in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a neighborhood that, like New York’s Lower East Side, has largely transitioned from old-world Jewish to hipster. Even inside — where boys, headphones over their yarmulkes, sit on mismatched chairs at long, battered wooden tables facing a velvet-curtained aron kodesh (ark) and tap away on black laptop computers — the scene seems more Borough Park than Silicon Valley.

Nonetheless, this modest 15-student yeshiva is the first Jewish school in the United States to offer all of its secular studies via a fully accredited (and state-funded) virtual charter school — enabling it to keep tuition at $7,500, less than half the cost of most American Jewish high schools.

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From The Jewish Week:

No one standing outside Yeshivas Ohev Shalom would peg it as an educational technology trendsetter.

This tiny, fervently Orthodox high school is housed in a rundown synagogue in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a neighborhood that, like New York’s Lower East Side, has largely transitioned from old-world Jewish to hipster. Even inside — where boys, headphones over their yarmulkes, sit on mismatched chairs at long, battered wooden tables facing a velvet-curtained aron kodesh (ark) and tap away on black laptop computers — the scene seems more Borough Park than Silicon Valley.

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From The Staten Island Advance:

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The Staten Island Hebrew Academy is scheduled to open in Graniteville this September with a rigorous math and science curriculum and an after-school program for grades kindergarten through 2.

The new academy, which will be located on the grounds of the Jewish Foundation School, will be open to all, but based on the needs of the Russian Jewish population. Russian will be offered as a second language.

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From The Jewish Week:

Soon after Jason “Yitzi” Flynn transferred his 10-year-old son from theRosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey to Teaneck’s Thomas Jefferson Middle School this fall, the phone calls started coming in.

Local Orthodox parents — sometimes as many as eight in one week — would call, wanting to know how his son was adjusting to public school, were the teachers good, was he managing to continue his Jewish learning, did he still have friends from yeshiva?

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From The Jewish Week:

For almost 30 years, Torah Academy High School of Brooklyn has been a haven for young men seeking an alternative to the rigid mainstream haredi yeshivas and the limited future career opportunities they afford.

Now, the future of TAB is itself in doubt, its fate in jeopardy over an application submitted to the New York State Attorney General by the school’s administrator seeking permission to sell school property.

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From The Jewish Week:

Early on in the deeply affecting new novel “Hush,” (Walker Books) the book’s narrator, a chasidic young woman named Gittel, finds herself sitting across from a social worker in the 66th Precinct in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Urged on by her only non-Jewish friend, a neighbor named Kathy, Gittel is there to give information about an act of sexual abuse she witnessed as a child — the rape of her best friend by the friend’s brother.

While Kathy has assured Gittel that God wants her to speak up and tell the truth after all these years, Gittel is plagued by doubt and guilt. “But Hashem did not want me to go. He had stated clearly in the Torah that it was a violation of the divine, a transgression of the commandments, to speak evil of other Jews. I was only here because of that, despite him.” 

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From The Fundermentalist:

By Jacob Berkman · November 15, 2010

In my welcome back from the GA in New Orleans, I’ll share with you a little news that is not so uplifting.

The New York Post, citing failedmessiah.com, is reporting that the United Lubavitcher Yeshiva in Crown Heights, NY, has been disqualified from the Kohl’s Cares Challenge after allegations of cheating.

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This past spring, my partner and I moved to Cincinnati. Soon after we arrived, an Orthodox synagogue in town prohibited our attendance. The rabbi of the shul called apologetically to inform us that the ruling had come from a rabbi whose authority exceeded his own. I decided to call this rabbi, who is the head of a prominent yeshiva and a respected halachic authority. I wanted to meet him personally to discuss the decision with him. He agreed to speak with me on the phone.

He said that he had heard that I advocated changing the Torah. I told him that this is not true, that in fact I am trying to find a way for people who are gay or lesbian to still be a part of Orthodox communities. I shared with him that people who are gay and lesbian who want to remain true to the Torah are in a great deal of pain. Many have just left the community. Some young gay people become so desperate they attempt suicide.

His reply: “Maybe it’s a mitzvah for them to do so.”

At first I was speechless. I asked for clarification, and yes, this is exactly what he meant. Since gay people are guilty of capital crimes, perhaps it might be a good idea for them to do the job themselves. For the rest of the conversation I was shaking, using every ounce of my strength to end the conversation without losing my composure.

His uncensored expression, one he might wish he hadn’t said, was surely beyond the pale in every in every way, even for the strictest of Orthodox rabbis. But in retrospect I am grateful to him for this transparent, if painful, honesty. Whether it is said so baldly or not, for many in the Orthodox community it would be better for us to disappear, one way or another. When teenagers come to understand how intense the communal desire for their erasure is, how brutal it can be, they can easily give in to despair as a number of them did just last month.

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