Harav Shmuel Kaminetsky responds to the plea of the Rabbonim of Queens (PHOTOS)

This past Thursday afternoon Harav Shmuel Kaminetsky visited the Chazaq Headquarters upon the request of the community Rabbonim. At the meeting, the Rabbonim and askanim discussed with the Rosh Hayeshiva and manhig hador, the challenges facing the Bucharian community. The foremost concern being the 10,000 traditional Bucharian children attending public school. While the parents are not anti-religious and keep many Jewish customs, they fail to realize the threat that the American public school poses to Yiddishkeit. Besides the violence and substance abuse that they become involved in, it has also led to widespread intermarriage r”l.

Harav Ilan Meirov. Rav of Bet Gavriel and co-founded of Chazaq described to the Rosh Hayeshiva the many programs that Chazaq offers to strengthen the community. They include Sunday and after schools programs, teen sessions for boys and girls, a complete Yeshiva cultivating community Rabbonim, a Kollel to bring the spirit of Torah to the community, and the famous lectures for adults numerous times a week. The most crucial program and the main topic of the meeting was the PSTY (Public School To Yeshiva) program.

Ephraim Rubinov, who was originally a successful computer technician and dropped his career to dedicate himself to tzarchei haklal, runs this program. He presented to the Rabbonim all the work that has been done, and can be done with the proper resources. He is currently running a task force of 10 recruiters that contact parents, discuss the physical and spiritual dangers of public school, help identify the appropriate religious school, and help them transition into new institutions. He has designed a computer program that stores a data base of thousands of children, the status of each active case, and every interaction of his team and the prospective yeshiva student. Ephraim himself is responsible for gathering all the documents needed to verify the lineage of each child. This can include birth certificates, marriage licences, and kesubos. With Hashem’s help they have already transferred over 548 children to yeshivos. The issues that they are facing are, that many of the appropriate mosdos require traveling quite a while and even those have very few slots available slots. There are over 300 children entering elementary school next year that can easily be placed in a yeshivos but don’t currently exist.

The obvious conclusion was to establish new local mosdos for the community. However this task cannot be accomplished by the community itself, and will require the help of Klal Yisroel. The Rosh Hayeshiva, who has traveled numerous time to Russia to strengthen the Yidishkeit of those remaining there will do all that he can to urge Klal Yisroel to help our Russian brothers and sisters residing in our back yard.

Below is a copy of the plea from the Bucharian Rabbonim to the Gedolei Yisroel to help save the young generation.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. The answer is simple: all you need to do is establish Yeshivas with reasonable rate tuition instead of $20,000 like it is in Queens and Five Towns. Why else are they setting to public school? They are even from kids going to public school frum Kids from These places, because of the costy tuition!

  2. Schools in queens absolutely are reasonably priced and the yeshivos there are happy to work with families who can not afford tuition.
    If you really think it’s a matter of just tuition you have a lot to learn unfortunately. There are billionaire Jews sending their kids to secular schools and this includes affiliated Jews

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