An official of Torah Umesorah, the Society for Hebrew Day Schools, urged the New York State Constitutional Convention here to repeal Article XI, section 3 of the State Constitution, which bars the use of public funds for non-public schools.
Testifying before the convention’s Bill of Rights and Suffrage Committee, Rabbi Bernard Goldenberg, director of Torah Umesorah’s Department of School Organization, asked the delegates to treat the problem in terms of the secular educational needs of the non-public school child, rather than by his creed or the school he attends. He proposed that the wording of the first amendment to the Federal Constitution be substituted for section 3, popularly known as the Blaine Amendment. He said that Orthodox Jewry did not ask that any principles “be shattered except the unholy principle of discrimination against nearly 1,000,000 children who attend non-public schools in New York state.”
He said American Orthodox Jewry generally believed that “in the last third of the 20th century, we must recognize that it is the legitimate concern of the state to improve the quality of education for all children in need of such improvement” and that “this concern should not be strangled by the restrictions of a constitutional provision which has outlived its usefulness.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
