Rabbi Pinchas Stolper — the haredi-leaning founder of NCSY, was a consistent defender of Baruch Lanner. In fact, he was the one who hired the bastard in the first place, and was his superior for many years.

After Lanner was busted by the Jewish Week, Rabbi Stolper was there to explain that these allegations of decades of kneeing boys and touching girls improperly had to be placed in context of an otherwise wonderful career as a kiruv professional. After all, Lanner “had such a magnificent impact” on young people. You know, he made them frum! And most importantly, touching girls and kicking boys wasn’t a sexual problem or anything as sordid as that. Oh, no, no, no. Rather,

“despite some obvious sickness that is not sexual but has to do with needing to be in control.”

Oh, so that’s why you let it go on…for decades.

So NCSY, who has had a very hard time of letting Lanner enablers go too far from home, wants you to emulate Rabbi Stolper.

Maybe if you work really hard to “inspire the Jewish future,” you will one day be awarded NCSY’s coveted Rebbetzin Elaine and Rabbi Pinchas Stolper Service Award.

This is the letter I sent to Rabbi Burg and NCSY:
[Read more →]

Liberal and Secular Jewish Parents, Warn Your Teens Not to Accept Candy From Strangers, or Pizza From NCSY/JSU!

The Orthodox Union president, Stephen Savitsky is busy. Busy, busy, busy. Turning liberal Jewish kids into yeshiva products! Thanks to the OU, your kid can have the value system you instilled in him replaced in a mere six weeks!

Steve Savitsky, the president of the Orthodox Union, the parent organization of NCSY, writes in the official organ of the OU, Jewish Action that,

“Six weeks of a camping experience can turn a Jewish public school student into a yeshivah product.”

Isn’t that wonderful?

Remember, though, it’s a process:

1) JSU public school recruitment through pizza parties
2) Latte and Learning
3) Shabbatons
4) Trips

Now, for those kids who are really open to rejection of western civilization and replacing it with a flat-out fundamentalist approach, have we got a trip for you! NCSY’s Kollel trip – because nothing advocates “Modern” Orthodoxy quite like “Kollel.”

“Six weeks of NCSY Kollel can transform a nice day school student into a budding ben Torah.”

To find a JSU chapter near you (and there are over 170 chapters, most, but not all of which are run by NCSY advisers who want to help your kid think like they do and not like you do, please go here.

These are the goals of NCSY. Not “to get more Jewish teens attending public high schools to do something Jewish! That’s it! It’s that simple!!!” They want to make the into “yeshivah products” — the head of the OU’s own coarse words. Not mine. Or, if they can, to make them into “b’nai Torah” — a type of Orthodoxy usually reserved for black hatters.

This is what they want. This is who they are.

The Jewish Student Union: Part 1

The Orthodox Union’s NCSY (National Council of Synagogue Youth) is recruiting public school kids to Orthodoxy through an ecumenical front, the Jewish Student Union(JSU). Rabbi Burg, the “dean�? of JSU, is also the national director of NCSY. Therefore, the ideal goal is to make high school students from secular and liberal Jewish backgrounds Orthodox.

But NCSY’s Jewish Student Union does not reveal its true identity anymore than it does its true goal.

NCSY/JSU declares that,

The mission of Jewish Student Union is to get more Jewish teens attending public high schools to do something Jewish! That’s it! It’s that simple!!!

In fact, it is not quite that simple; that is most certainly not “it.�? JSU strives to do much more than “something�? Jewish.

Their website may not be for high school kids primarily, but more to ease potential concerns of parents and school administrators who may have interest in the position of this youth group.

As part of NCSY/JSU’s deceptive attempts to suggest they are an ecumenical organization without a specific religious bent, JSU offer links including the Conservative Movement’s youth group, United Synagogue Youth, as well as Hadassah’s Young Judea.

This is an intentional red herring. Every one of the “cool advisors�? of JSU is Orthodox, such as Rabbi FE, the charismatic west coast director of NCSY. But NCSY attempts to conceal this fact from the casual observer. On their “cool advisors�? page, they do this two ways, both quite clever. They have more than half of the “cool advisors�? in costume or choosing superhero photos for their picture. But there is a picture of a woman wearing a short sleeve shirt. However, as clicking through her link will reveal, she is not actually a JSU advisor. Only NCSY approved Orthodox Jews are “cool advisors.�?

NCSY maintains control over these unions in order to recruit to NCSY proper, and of course, to offer solely Orthodox approved content. But that isn’t the reason they offer for the purpose of the cool ones. Rather, a cool one,

* Spends time working with the President to develop programs and program resources.
* Meets on a regular basis with all of the officers of each club to work on developing leadership skills and help them learn to work together as a leadership team.
* Meets with the faculty sponsor and/or the school administration to keep the lines of communication open.
* Provide after school engagement activities such as Latte ‘n’ Learning discussion groups and other programs.
* The most important thing that the Advisor does is maintain contact via email and phone with all of the JSU teens who come to meetings. A weekly call to a teen to say “Shabbat Shalom�? goes a long way in cementing that relationship and reinforcing the Advisor as a positive Jewish role model.
* The number of hours necessary per week, based on 5 clubs, is forty.

Nothing about Orthodox proselytizing.

Rather, JSU claims the expected content of these clubs is:

* A club business meeting
* Speakers from other organizations
* Visitors from Israel
* A discussion or debate on current events
* Holiday celebrations
* Falafel-eating contests
* A rousing game of “Jewpardy�?
* In addition, and most important to some teens, is the free pizza or falafel! Teens may come for the food, but they stay for the discussions and sense of community.

Maybe that’s why the kids are there, but those aren’t the reasons NCSY is. NCSY wants to recruit secular and liberal Jews to Orthodoxy. JSU is a gateway into NCSY proper. Rather, JSU is NCSY proper.

This may not be understood by parents or students, because NCSY prefers they do not understand this, and is taking great pains to hide this fact.

Additionally, NCSY has a grim view of the best colleges, and prefers all NCSYers go either to “dual curriculum�? schools (such as Touro, a third tier college NCSY is heavily allied with) and to ultra-Orthodox institutions that discourage all full-time secular studies.

The Orthodox Union, the parent organization, is quite proud of NCSY’s success in discouraging Ivy League schools specifically (which NCSY refers to as “poison ivies�? in their eponymous essay on the subject in their educational guide) and through their haredi partners, discourage college generally, to even the brightest public school students for after they graduate, and have boasted of this in their house organ, Jewish Action. Note how they declined to name their “clubs�? by the official name (Jewish Student Union), even as they boasted how so many of them declined to go to Ivy League Schools because of their influence.

The fact that they brag about this to Orthodox Union members means that they feel comfortable their members will approve of NCSY’s desired results. To be fair, the Jewish Action article did not reveal the deceit employed by NCSY facilitating their entry into the public school system.

Do not expect these policies of NCSY’s JSU to be discussed in your local Jewish weekly if it has any ties to the UJA (United Jewish Communities).

The Jewish Student Union –- though a deceptive Orthodox outreach program seeking public high school converts — is a beneficiary of many local federations, and these newspapers rarely are critical of Jewish Federation beneficiaries, because they depend on the Federation for funding and their circulation, and are expected in return to promote the Federation’s specific beneficiaries as well as the umbrella organization generally.

According to the Fall 2005 Jewish Action article, NCSY has over one hundred public high school clubs across North America. JSU is a major source of (deceitful) recruitment of Jewish teenagers into their general NCSY programming. Parents may have no knowledge ( never mind interest) that their teenager is facing proselyting efforts to become Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox in his or her public school, by an organization that disapproves of secular college attendance, and advocates and negotiates full-time study at ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and seminaries in Israel after graduation.

But this only happens if they listen.

Update: NCSY is apparently beginning to work with BBYO in Chicago. They are protecting their recruitment clubs through such partnerships. These clubs will continue to recruit to NCSY regular programming — first latte learning, then shabbatons, and we know where they seek to take kids from there. They are absolutely not content to throw pizza parties for publics school kids, or for them to just do “something” Jewish. They want more, and that’s fine. The problem is what they really want, and what they’ll really do, if they can have their way with them. “It’s that simple!!!”