Alexandra Hootnick, "A Rising Tide of Sephardic Jews Brings Change to the Yeshivah of Flatbush"
David Shasha
A Rising Tide of Sephardic Jews Brings Change to the Yeshivah of Flatbush
By: Alexandra Hootnick
The following article was one that I did not become aware of until this week, when it was reposted to a Facebook group and forwarded to me. What it says about the Brooklyn Syrian-Sephardic community is of the utmost importance in understanding the problems of the Sephardic heritage at the present time.
Before I begin to unpack the article and its meaning, here are a few items to provide context to the discussion:
http://forward.com/articles/130141/a-peaceful-coexistence-remains-despite-student-tur/
The Forward article contains my own comments on the situation which created a stir in the self-hating Sephardic youth who raised their voices in some ugly Talkbacks that are posted at the end of the article. There is a deep well of raw emotion when it comes to Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations at the Yeshivah of Flatbush that sparks strong feelings in support of Ashkenazim and harsh attacks for anyone who would seek to question Ashkenazi hegemony.
I have addressed this hegemony many times:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/yj_4nB1nWTk/PSVcxzqBsKEJ
My article “A Broken Frame” became a part of this process, as I wrote and submitted it to Rabbi Marc Angel’s journal Conversations – “conversation” here meaning an internal Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox conversation closed off to an independent Sephardic representation, one that rejects the Ashkenazi hegemony – and saw it rejected. It was not up to the standard necessary for this “conversation,” which in reality is not a “conversation” at all, but a closed discursive system which demands strict fidelity to the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox ideal.
And there is this article I wrote in response to a complaint by a Syrian Jewish student at Yeshiva University who was taken aback over his professor’s harsh denigration of Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/nbuhc_7BNZI/I6yF0qSYtWAJ
The student, a typical product of the Brooklyn educational system, had no idea how to deal with the absence of Sephardic authors in an introductory course on Modern Hebrew literature because he never studied any such books. He simply became apoplectic over the exclusion of Sephardim and the bald-faced hostility expressed by the professor towards the Sephardic heritage.
Such young Sephardim suffer not only from the general intellectual-cultural malaise of our benighted age, but from a uniquely self-imposed form of self-hatred and contempt for their own heritage.
I followed this article up with another attack on the “Idiot Sephardim” mentality and the danger it has posed for the community:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/I5LcowTL5kE
I wrote yet another essay on the destruction of the Sephardic heritage at the hands of self-hating Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/oX-kysf4mFY/7e0UaJsg7MAJ
There has been very strong positive connection between Brooklyn Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi culture. As the Sephardim reject their own intellectual culture, they have created – as this article clearly shows – a set of “Sephardic” values that can comfortably co-exist under the Ashkenazi hegemonic system.
This set of “Sephardic” values rests in the world of ritual custom and in food and music traditions. The following article details how “beautiful” the Sephardic liturgical tradition is, and how deeply tied members of the Brooklyn community are to that tradition.
The article completely fails to discuss the Sephardic intellectual tradition in any substantial manner.
The Head of the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, Rabbi Raymond Harari, is a firm believer in Ashkenazi hegemony and the subservience of Sephardim to this epistemological-cultural ideal. Rabbi Harari, along with his classmate, the late Rabbi Ezra Labaton, attended Yeshiva University in the late 1960s and spearheaded an accelerated movement in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey which adopted the weltanschauung of the Ashkenazi tradition under the tutelage of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the titular head of Modern Orthodoxy.
It was an emphatic rejection of the Sephardic heritage conducted in a spirit of dogmatic militancy; as if the chains of the past were being broken and a brand new world of possibilities was opening up.
The key tenet of the new thinking was that Ashkenazim were intellectually and culturally superior to Sephardim, and that it was necessary for Sephardim to acclimate to the Ashkenazi values. Every mainstream institution in the Brooklyn Sephardic community hewed to this vision and rejected, sometimes with great cruelty and viciousness, any attempt to revive the Sephardic heritage.
The entente that was created at that time has since eroded and collapsed. Emerging in its wake has been a radical Ultra-Orthodox cadre represented by institutions like Ateret Torah, Shaare Torah, and the Avenue J Torah Center. The primary Synagogue in Sephardic Brooklyn, Shaare Zion, is now under the control of Ultra-Orthodox elements tied to the Lithuanian Yeshivah world.
I have addressed this issue in a special edition of the SHU on ArtScroll and Sephardic Judaism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/NON7CA5cAoE/t1M4QkRiLCoJ
This development is closely connected to the evisceration of the legacy of the great Aleppo-born Rabbi Matloub Abadi:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/dpebJezm5Ic/rvQ82UnIALkJ
This older Syrian-Sephardic tradition has currently been reduced to some tunes and ritual customs – and, of course, the food.
The actual intellectual substance of this tradition is completely absent from school curricula in the community. Students are not being taught the rudiments of Sephardic Jewish history and its literature. The unity that is being articulated by Syrians like Rabbi Harari is one that accepts this absence of Sephardic civilization as completely normative. The synthesis that has been created is one that accepts the absolute authority of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy.
It is this synthesis that has led to the internal collapse of Sephardic tradition and to the ultimate triumph of the Ultra-Orthodox “Black Hats.”
As has been the case in the Orthodox community more generally, institutions like the Yeshivah of Flatbush have become passé as we see the inexorable move of Orthodox Judaism to the extreme Right.
The article fudges the actual reason for the dispersion of the local Ashkenazi community that originally founded the Yeshivah of Flatbush. In reality, the Modern Orthodox Brooklynites were pushed out by a very aggressive movement of the Borough Park Ultra-Orthodox into the Midwood area. Borough Park lies to the West of Midwood, and as the community there expanded, property values skyrocketed and individuals began to move East, encroaching on and eventually displacing the Modern Orthodox enclave, of which the Syrian Jews had been a minor part.
The current reality of the Yeshivah of Flatbush is one of an institution in decline, in the twilight of its tenure as a leading institution in a Modern Orthodox world that is dissolving. For the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn this means that Modern Orthodoxy, which has been the dominant religious force in our schools and Synagogues since the 1970s, is an experiment that is largely done with. The mainstream of the community is now in the thrall of the Ultra-Orthodox and internal pressures to conform to a Lakewood-style model, as strongly espoused by someone like Rabbi Eli Mansour, are apparent:
Most famously, there is Rabbi Mansour’s impassioned defense of the Ashkenazi tradition, which reads very much like an Ultra-Orthodox version of what Rabbi Harari says in this article:
In the end, the Brooklyn Sephardic community has been forced to accept one form of Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism or another. In the 1970s and 80s there was a widespread adoption of the Modern Orthodox system, while more recently we have seen a hostile takeover by the Lakewood faction that has become dominant.
In both of these cases it is the classical Andalusian-Sephardic tradition that has been the victim. At this time there is not a single institution in the Brooklyn Sephardic community that has a curriculum designed to teach this tradition. Thus we have young people who become overexcited about the liturgy and whether they eat rice on Passover. The actual literary heritage of the Sephardim is not an issue and is not at all part of the consciousness of the community. There is no discussion about the Sephardic intellectual heritage and the legacy of our Sages. Hakham Matloub Abadi is but a cipher to the students in our Yeshivas.
It is a tragic situation that is reflected in the following article which presents a Sephardic community unmoored from its heritage and value system, better known as Religious Humanism.
For more on the illustrious legacy of Sephardic Religious Humanism:
DS
As Passover approached 25 years ago, Diane Chabbot’s daughter was finally ready to participate in the songs and prayers of the seder with her family. The first grader had been practicing them constantly in her Hebrew day school class at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. But when the little girl realized the Ashkenazi prayer melodies she had come to know didn’t match the melodies sung by her large Syrian family, she began to cry.
The incident was subsequently brought before the school’s board of education by Chabbot’s family rabbi and current head of the yeshivah’s high school, Raymond Harari. It reflected not just one family’s experience but rather a major demographic change in the neighborhood and the yeshivah. The growing Syrian population in Flatbush was tilting the yeshivah’s student body from a historically Ashkenazi majority, descending from German or Eastern European Jews, to a Sephardic majority, descending from Spanish or Middle Eastern Jews. By 1989, three years later, the school had instituted an Integrated Sephardic Ashkenazic Seder and a school-wide Sephardic tefillah, or morning prayer, as an alternative to the Ashkenazi one. And those were only the beginning of the educational adaptations.
“We’re not completely different, the basic conceptions are the same,” said Chabbot, who adopted her Syrian husband’s Sephardic customs after being raised in an Ashkenazi household. “But customs are different, melodies are different, shul is different, and so some of the things that have changed are just this awareness of the richness of the different cultures.”
Rabbi Lawrence Schwed became a principal at the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s elementary school in the late 1980s, and said the first thing that he did was create Sephardic tefillah groups so that both Ashkenazi and Sephardic children could pray according to their respective traditions. “What good does it do for me to teach you how I pray,” Schwed said, if “ your parents aren’t familiar with it and that’s not what you’re going to hear in your synagogue.”
Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish population is currently estimated to be 75,000 and growing, and Schwed said that “the vast majority” of the school’s K-8 students are now Sephardic, compared to about half in 1989.
Ashkenazic Jews and Sephardic Jews vary in cultural practices and dietary considerations as well as religious prayers and customs. For example, Ashkenazi Jews, unlike the Sephardim, refrain from eating rice during Passover. In Sephardic culture, naming children after grandparents is common, even if they are alive, while Ashkenazim typically pass the names of deceased relatives to the next generation.
Founded in 1927, the Yeshivah of Flatbush is a coeducational, Modern Orthodox private school with roughly 2,100 students. According to the school’s executive vice president, Dennis Eisenberg, the school has always drawn from the Sephardic community, but in increasing numbers over the years. Eisenberg said this trend is even more pronounced in the elementary and middle schools because community demographics drive the student population, but that the school does not collect data on how many students enroll in either the Sephardic or Ashkenazic minyanim, or morning prayer meetings.
Still, Harari said the school doesn’t define itself as Ashkenazic or Syrian. “There was always a desire to have an integration of both traditions,” said the head of the Joel Braverman High School.
The first Syrian Jews came to America in the early 20th century and initially settled in Manhattan, but moved to the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn after the Eastern European Jews dominating Manhattan denigrated them as “Arab Jews.” In the 1980s, the Syrians who had accumulated a degree of wealth and success began to flow into Flatbush, where home values were rising.
Schwed said the school ran routine staff-development programs in order to train what was then a mostly Ashkenazi staff in becoming familiar with Sephardic culture. “The teachers had to retool, just like you have to technologically retool these days,” Schwed said, although the Yeshivah of Flatbush does not hire nor keep count of teachers based on their Sephardic or Ashkenazic backgrounds.
Other than the morning tefillah, Sephardic and Ashkenazic students attend the same classes. During the after-lunch prayer and holidays, the school either alternates between or observes both Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.
In the yeshivah’s preschool, however, Schwed said students are only taught the Sephardic tefillah, a change that was made several years ago when the student population tilted towards a Sephardic majority. Having separate tefillot “was too confusing for the children,” Schwed said. “So now everybody in the preschool learns Sephardic tefillah, and beginning in first grade we separate them based on what their parents choose.”
In 2008, the elementary school launched an updated Sephardic tefillah program that Schwed said has exceeded beyond the school’s wildest expectations. “Our students were always top academically, but we got killed on Shabbat because our kids couldn’t compete with the kids from the other schools in terms of prayers,” Schwed said. “Now our kids are flying on Shabbat.”
Alex Schindler, a 2007 graduate, wrote in an email that the elementary school’s efforts have allowed the Yeshivah of Flatbush to compete for Syrian students with nearby, exclusively Sephardic day schools like Magen David.
In the last few years, Harari said, the yeshivah’s Joel Braverman High School has offered a Sephardic history elective in addition to Sephardic-based independent study. The mandatory Jewish history class has also given increased emphasis to Sephardic history.
Schindler wrote that while he expected the amount of Sephardic programming to eventually increase in the high school, there currently wasn’t much.
“The mandatory Jewish history class, for example, is almost entirely synonymous, when dealing with the modern period, with Modern Ashkenazi Jewish history, though my teacher taught a little bit of Sephardic history,” Schindler wrote, adding that the exams students could take for Yeshiva University credit wouldn’t test for the Sephardic material.
Eisenberg said that in the high school a greater balance exists between Sephardic and Ashkenazi students, with students commuting from areas like New Jersey, Manhattan and Westchester. Schindler wrote that he estimates the proportion is now about 70 percent Sephardic, 30 percent Ashkenazic. When he was in high school, the Sephardic students’ minyan was moved into the auditorium previously occupied by the Ashkenazic students, who were relocated into classrooms as their numbers continued to fall.
Ashkenazi Jews have slowly trickled out of Flatbush and Midwood to enclaves in the tri-state area partly due to a growing affluence. Schwed said another reason was that during 1980s housing boom in Flatbush, some Ashkenazim decided to sell their homes and move to where their children had relocated. “Their kids were not coming back to Flatbush,” Schwed said.
Schwed also said more Modern Orthodox schools have sprung up in areas where Ashkenazim have relocated, and have improved in addition to being closer to students. While the school used to have two full buses of Ashkenazim coming in from Staten Island, Schwed said now they’re down to one van. “The Yeshivah of Flatbush used to be the only show in town in terms of what we offered,” Schwed said. “Now many, many schools have copied our model, and that’s very flattering.”
The remaining Ashkenazic population in Flatbush is predominately “black-hat,” or stringently Orthodox Jews, who are less inclined to engage in secular society or send their children to a modern, coeducational Orthodox school like the Yeshivah of Flatbush.
Ami Sasson, the president-elect of the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Ladies Auxiliary and 1992 graduate, said she had many Ashkenazic friends while she was a student, and the groups’ outward trend was a loss to the diversity of Flatbush. “A lot of people in school, including my kids,” she said, “say they wish there were more Ashkenaz.”
Schwed said the yeshivah currently gives $9 million of its $36 million budget in tuition assistance. There has been some discussion about possible merit scholarships to the school in the future, but despite the high costs of a private religious education, Schwed said the school has been “bursting at the seams” with a rapidly growing student population. Schwed said more pupils want to come to the Yeshivah of Flatbush because they “want the mix of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, even though the shift has gone the other way.”
From Brooklyn Ink, July 26, 2011