(As a fascinating footnote, Rabbi Baruch Pollack, may he be well, taught the first grade for nearly sixty years, the final thirty at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School on Staten Island. Rabbi Mandel and Rabbi Pollack were first cousins.)
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Very few and perhaps no mainstream yeshivas would today accept a nine-year-old boy into the first grade, and that has been the case for a long while. As I have written in this newspaper, if Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol would come to our yeshivas today, they would be turned away. We were fortunate that the menahel of RJJ was Rabbi Dr. Hillel Weiss, a stern man with a great heart. He had studied together with my father at the great Pressburg Yeshiva in Austria-Hungary and that may have been a factor in his admitting Allen and me, although I believe there were other students who benefited similarly from his generous outlook.
I remember the shock when Rabbi Weiss died suddenly in 1953 and I know how his loss contributed enormously to the decline of RJJ on the Lower East Side.
What pains me most is not the occasional situation of a yeshiva refusing to accept an older student who does not have the Judaic skills of the students who are already in the school. Far more painful is the much more common occurrence of yeshivas turning down children who do not have the right background or who do not seem to be smart enough or who appear to be a bit unruly or simply because there are parents who object to having such a child in a classroom together with their own child.
As I said more than a quarter of a century ago when I was the guest of honor at the annual dinner of Torah Umesorah, we speak a great deal about kiruv rechokim, when in fact too many of us have become adept at richuk kerovim. We are turning away those who are close to us.
I have spent sixty-three years working on behalf of Torah education and nothing hurts me more than the realization that there is a culture of rejection in our religious life and that this culture is especially embedded in many of our most vital institutions, yeshivas, and day schools.
Allen and I had Mr. Markoff in the second grade and Mr. Reisberg in the third grade of Jewish studies. These days, and for quite a while now, whenever a teaching vacancy occurs in a yeshiva there is likely to be a large pool of applicants, all of whom studied at an advanced yeshiva and have semichah. In the earlier period of yeshiva/day school development in the United States, there was a paucity of yeshiva graduates who went into teaching and all of the major yeshivas, including Torah Vodaath and Chaim Berlin, tended to rely on maskilim or secularly educated persons to teach religious classes at the lower grade levels.
Mr. Markoff was personally Orthodox and generally soft, although he had the practice of using a ruler to rap the knuckles of students who were unruly. Mr. Reisberg was not Orthodox and he had a tendency to hit students. He once threw me down a flight of stairs. At the dinner forty years ago at which I was installed as RJJ’s president, in the course of my speech I said to my mother, “Do you remember the teacher who threw me down a flight of stairs? I fired him yesterday.”
Although we were progressing fairly well, Rabbi Weiss believed that a change of venue would be beneficial and he suggested that my mother transfer us to a local yeshiva in Boro Park. This brought us to Toras Emes and Rabbi Elias Schwartz, then still a young man, who was one of the outstanding students of Rabbi Mendelowitz of Torah Vodaath.
