In 2018, former officials of the [Central United Talmudical Academy, famous for its one hundred percent failure rate on a very simple standardized exam,] pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served... This is classic American graft… [T]ax evasion and welfare fraud are an open secret... When Jews break [the law] so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.
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The classic example is Lakewood, NJ; but it’s pretty much everywhere, cuz when you deny the legitimacy – nay, the very existence! – of any entity outside yourself, whatever IS out there exists only to be exploited. Laws? The ‘laws’ are their bogus godless laws. We’re the only godly location in the universe; we answer only to God, who speaks to us and us alone through our rabbis; and if our ‘crimes’ are hurting the heathens, so much the better.
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What almost none of the critics of the [NYT] article I have read mention is that this story is really about corruption: the corruption of city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations. And the politicians who have looked the other way and ignored non-compliance, assumingly to cultivate Haredi favor in the voting booth. As much as this a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political corruption.
… R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes today, is quoted in the article as saying “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a featured essay in the Times.