A photocopy machine from around the age of the bicentennial sat crookedly on a pile of papers. The main office looked like a converted storage closet, where the other rabbi, who was the head of the Yeshiva - Rabbi Alter - maintained his desk of clutter. I immediately wondered whether or not these teenage boys wanted to be here at all. The room smelled of institutionalized food, large pots of barley soup and cleaning products. We would work among the rodent traps and their unmistakable blue pellets of poison. “We use every part of the building.” My ninth grade class was to meet in the basement cafeteria.
A leaning mattress blocked the hallway to the semi-kitchen. There were no paper towels in the bathroom the toilet seat jiggled. I quickly got a feel for the three-story building. Though I strongly identified as Jewish, I was hardly religious, and I had formed my own opinions about the crazy Haredim in Israel - for instance, those who were making world headlines by forbidding women to sit in the front of buses, and spitting on young girls in short-sleeved blouses. On the one hand I felt reassured by the familiar Jewishness of the setting, but on the other I felt a sense of alienation, distrust and unease. Mayer was a 2014 Deadline Club finalist for this essay.
I had asked Rabbi Berman if I needed to wear a hat or a yarmulke out of respect, and he’d told me to wear what was comfortable, so I wore a nice button down shirt and my best suit pants.Īuthor Larry N. I peeked into a central room several boys were praying, others studying. A sickly-sweet smell pervaded the building. In the small vestibule, deep-brimmed round black hats were resting on shelves and brown-covered prayer books were piled carelessly. On my first day, I walked uncertainly up the steps of the front doorway. I started as a high school English teacher in the crack-infested South Bronx of the early 1990s, moved my way around the country to a school in a juvenile detention home in Ohio, to several at-risk high schools in inner city Boston, and finally to teaching Holocaust studies and creative writing to mostly apathetic college students in the Pacific Northwest. Because of my wife’s academic career, we had relocated several times as a family and I was used to taking unusual teaching jobs. These kids were going to be a handful, yet I imagined I could handle anything. to 6 p.m., when they studied literature, history, science and math, were considered down time. The yeshiva bokherim, as they are called, studied Talmud and Torah all day, getting up at 7 a.m.
Non-religious subjects were a time to unwind, sleep or break down the walls of the old Victorian house. Yet he gave me fair warning: Regular high school subjects for these Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews), he said, “didn’t count” in the bigger scheme of things. During my tenure at the school, he would be a good boss in that he rarely interfered. Only now does it occur to me that he never looked at it. I was Jewish, I had 20 years of experience teaching English in high schools and at the college level, and I had even written and published a book on Jewish identity in Poland, which I’d brought to our meeting and placed on his desk. Upon meeting at our interview, he turned away from me, pumped his fist like a little boy, and whispered to himself, “Yes! Yes!” He smiled easily and was shy in a scholarly way. A youngish man with an expressive face and a brown beard, he seemed to be moonlighting as principal - a way to earn extra money and perhaps satisfy a lesser passion for teaching. Though he led his own Orthodox congregation several blocks away, Rabbi Berman was in charge of the yeshiva’s secular education program. In light of The New York Times’ recent investigation into education at Orthodox schools, we are revisiting the piece. Mayer’s 2013 essay, which was a finalist for a Deadline Club award. Editor’s note: This is a republication of Larry N.
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