Tel-Chai Nation

And if you look at the situation closely under a microscope, you'll see why this development isn't so great:

Jewish day school enrollment in the United States is up 12 percent from five years ago, primarily due to growth in haredi Orthodox schools.

Nearly 255,000 students are enrolled in 861 Jewish day schools from the pre-K level through 12th grade, according to a new census of the schools conducted by the Avi Chai Foundation.

The day school survey, which has been conducted every five years since 1998-99, found 59 more schools and 26,437 more students since the last study, in 2008-09. Previous surveys found enrollment growth rates of about 11 percent in each five-year period.

The primary drivers of growth have been Hasidic students, whose enrollment has increased by 110 percent since the first census 15 years ago, and yeshivish (haredi non-Hasidic) schools, which have grown by 60 percent since the 1998-99 survey.

The challenge is “whether there will be sufficient [financial and infrastructure] resources to provide adequately for the growth in these two sectors,” said Marvin Schick, who conducted the survey for Avi Chai.

Overall, 60 percent of Jewish day school students in America are haredi Orthodox.

And quite a few of those schools, you can be certain, belong to clans like Satmar, they of the anti-Israel stance, and the heavy reliance on welfare doles, which does no favors for the wider Jewish community. So it's not such good news at all.

Labels: haredi corruption, Judaism, New York, United States