Israeli Rabbi says ‘Jewish women getting an education is worse than all the fires of Auschwitz’

Failed Messiah

In his speech last night to the emergency conference against women’s secular education organized by the rabbis of the Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism Party, one of the rosh yeshivas who spoke, Rabbi Aviezer Pilz, said, ‘In previous generations were major attempts, like Siberia and the like, as well as all the other troubles that the Jewish people have. It seems as if the furnaces of this generation burn more intensely than the furnaces of Auschwitz,’ Kikar HaShabbat reported.

Another haredi yeshiva leader, Rabbi Nosson Zochovsky, told those assembled that ‘high wages for women in and of themselves posed a danger to haredi Jewish life’.

‘High wages are also a danger. Families need to have income, but if the wife starts to bring home an excessively high salary because of the college she studied in and because of the courses she’s taken there, it’s a danger to the entire structure of the home,’ Zochovsky noted, adding he himself stayed on the straight and narrow because ‘I didn’t become a cabinet minister and ‘important.’’

Other rabbis who spoke said that if the woman has an advanced degree and is familiar with academic culture, she will naturally begin to assume the role as the leader of the household because her husband only studies Torah and is less worldly than she is, and that will ‘destroy the family’.

‘The foundation of a kosher, Jewish household exists when the woman knows what a life of Torah is and what sacrifice is necessary for her and for the family to make for that Torah,’ said Rabbi Dovid Cohen. ‘A career of being ‘important’ and of being exposed to the world and belonging to that wider world dooms a Torah household to great destruction, and secular education poses a danger to Torah households…The numbers are rising, the percentages are increasing and, if we do not put a stop to it now, the danger will only spread wider and expand.…Children’s education comes from and is dependent upon the mother, and the reality is, anyone who goes to these places, to universities and colleges, everything for them and their families is lost.’

Rabbi Shmuel Yaakov Borenstein, the yeshiva head of Kiryas Melech, complained about the ‘impurity’ of secularism and in particular of the Gentriles.

‘All those things that come from outside make the land of Israel impure. This influence of impurity, of foreign affairs, the impurity of the Gentile nations, the impurity of secularism. Traces of all this impurity are engraved in the souls and hearts of girls and affects them all…Certainly this is a great danger and terrible,’ Borenstein told the emergency conference.

At the conference, a letter from supreme Ashkenazi Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman was read, and one of the conference organizers pointed out that Steinman told a haredi yeshiva student whose daughter wanted to go to a university or college to get a teaching degree that she shouldn’t do it. Steinman compared women’s secular studies to stealing and said that stealing wasn’t as bad, because the money you steal could eventually be returned, but the impurities picked up by being in a secular, Gentile environment and studying academic subjects can never be removed from a person’s soul.

The rabbis agreed to ban all academic studies for women and agreed their schools would refuse to recognize degrees and certificates issued by universities and colleges and any other schools or seminaries not under the direct control of the Ashkenazi Education Committee. Female teachers who submit diplomas and certificates from outside institutions in order to receive a pay raise won’t get one, the rabbis promised.

According to a report in Yeshiva World, the other main points agreed on by the rabbis are as follows:

–Top haredi rabbis are responsible for the education of Jewish girls from the youngest age until the completion of school.

–There is a real danger in all institutions that teach secular subjects. The danger comes from both the subject matter taught and from the teachers themselves.

–Jewish girls and women are forbidden to study in academic institutions, even those  academic institutions which are extensions of haredi Bais Yaakov high schools and the like, and even if those academic institutions calls themselves ‘seminaries.’ They’re all forbidden if they grant  academic diplomas.

–Jewish girls may not get a high school matriculation diploma (bagrut). This applies without exception to all girls and it must be stringently enforced by school principals.

–Jewish girls may not take classes or seminars meant to prepare them for entry into colleges and universities or to help them take high school matriculation exams outside the haredi school framework. This applies without exception to all girls.

–All studies and continuing education seminars attended by the girls and teachers in Bais Yaakov haredi girls schools must exclusively be done within the Bais Yaakov framework. Anything else is forbidden.

–Women are forbidden to earn academic diplomas.