The Dire Social Downward Mobility of the Baal Teshuvah

I have long railed against the poverty created by the haredi baal teshuvah movement. When in public, in front of liberal and secular Jews, many insist they don’t know what I am talking about. They have not heard of this problem in any significant way. Maybe one or two individuals…but certainly not generally. After all, why should a hardline against secular education and in Israel–against the work ethic — possibly lead to poverty?

But when out of earshot, the frum say something quite different. And because the lowly BT does not have the nepotistic network of the frum world, he may not only become as poor as the average haredi, he may become still poorer.

Jonathan Rosenblum writes on Cross-Currents,

Last year, I wrote a column about Rabbi Aharon Betzalel, who was struggling to keep open a Talmud Torah in Kadima for children of ba’alei teshuva. At the time, he was reduced to personally collecting every night the money for gas to bring the rebbes to school the next morning and cleaning the floors himself.

Yet all he needed to put the Talmud Torah on a sound financial footing was enough money to make improvements in the physical plant necessary to gain recognition from the Education Ministry. Twenty thousand dollars from two or three donors who had never before heard of Rabbi Betzalel did the trick. Their contributions were leveraged to produce government funding of many times that amount annually.

Already, there are 140 students registered for next year, as compared to 80 this year. Rabbi Betzalel’s biggest worry is no longer how he will make it through the day, but where to find 30,000 shekels for new furniture to accommodate the huge jump in the students.

These children of baal teshuvah are indeed in dire straights, as so many other children of baalei teshuvah are.

Please help them. Help us stop this haredi machine towards poverty. For the haredi-kiruv machine grows every day. Each slithery tentacle must be amputated from a high school or college or trip to Israel program one by one. And when it grows back, it must be amputated again.