A “lock-out” of 16 Hebrew teachers of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshivah, one of the largest Jewish parochial schools in New York located on the East Side, caused considerable excitement in Orthodox circles in New York last week. The “lock-out” was due to a dispute over a proposed ten percent reduction in the salaries of the teachers. When the teachers came to the school building on Thursday to resume their classes after the holiday season, they were told that they were discharged and that new teachers had been engaged. Police were stationed at the door to prevent them from entering.
Commenting on the situation, Ephraim Kaplan, Orthodox publicist, writes in Friday’s Jewish Morning Journal:
“To throw out sixteen old teachers, learned men, who the Yeshivah itself in its continual appeals to the Jewish public had said were the best and most proper guides for the rearing of a pious Jewish generation, is, we are sorry to say, a bad precedent, a sad example of ‘Chilul ha’shem.’
“To teach Torah under a guard of ‘cops,’ to degrade a Yeshivah to a factory around which ‘capital’ and ‘labor’ match their strength—what can be a greater degradation of the Torah than this?”
The new teachers who replaced the old ones are condemned for their action by Mr. Kaplan and by the Day in an editorial in the latter’s Friday issue. Mr. Kaplan proposes that the dispute be arbitrated by an impartial committee of New York Orthodox rabbis.
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