The cause of religious liberty will soon face a test at New York’s highest court in a dispute over whether the state’s chasidic Jews are required to teach their children profane subjects in their schools. “What’s at stake is the ability of parents to choose a thoroughly religious education for their children, free from the state’s push to standardize and thereby secularize them,” a lawyer for the chasidic schools, Avi Schick, tells the Sun.

Meantime, the chasidic schools, known as yeshivas, are beseeching President Trump’s education department for relief, calling for the Feds to end New York’s “discriminatory practices,” which threaten to “strip the Yeshivas of their essential Jewish character.” The schools contend that if they “can’t devote sufficient time to Jewish Studies with instruction in their original language,” then the result is that “they are no longer Jewish schools.”

The quarrel in New York was sparked when the state education department — spurred in part by a Times investigation — adopted new regulations requiring private schools in the state to provide a “substantially equivalent” education to public schools. Based on that policy, state officials decided in the fall of 2022 that “a private Hasidic Jewish boys’ school in Brooklyn” was “violating the law by failing to provide a basic education.” 

The determination was seen to “signal profound challenges for scores of Hasidic religious schools that have long resisted government oversight,” the Times reported. The yeshivas, in their appeal to the state high court, say New York has exceeded its authority by using the new regulation to force “the closure of private schools” by way of “requiring all of their students to unenroll from the school chosen by their parents.”

The Empire State litigation, along with the federal complaint, arises at a time when the Supreme Court, especially since Chief Justice Roberts acceded to the bench, has been expanding religious liberties by erasing artificial barriers erected by the left between church and state. The result has been a growing body of law protecting a more expansive notion of religious free exercise in America. Will that jurisprudence extend to the chasidic yeshivas?

The Sun’s view is that precedent supports the yeshivas. From the outset of this dispute, these columns saw the scrutiny on the schools as “a campaign intended to regulate the religious free exercise of the chasidic yeshivas and establish that the state education mandates outrank America’s Bill of Rights.” The Sun pointed to a case from 1972, Wisconsin v. Yoder, that vindicated the Amish custom of removing children from school at age 14.

Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Burger explained that the Amish parents believed “that their children’s attendance at high school, public or private, was contrary to the Amish religion and way of life.” He noted their view that “salvation requires life in a church community separate and apart from the world and worldly influence.” Their “objection to formal education,” Burger wrote, “was firmly grounded in these central religious concepts.” 

As a result, Burger concluded, Wisconsin’s effort to keep the Amish students in school was crosswise with the Constitution, because it required the Amish “to perform acts undeniably at odds with fundamental tenets of their religious beliefs.” In other words, the Amish parents’ free exercise rights superseded the state’s effort to mandate a high school education. Will the Yoder precedent prove predictive in the yeshivas case?

The yeshivas are relying in part on Yoder. The schools point to the case in their federal complaint, noting how Orthodox and chasidic Jews have long resisted the “requirements of contemporary society exerting a hydraulic insistence on conformity to majoritarian standards.” That is the kind of liberty that the Framers meant to protect in the First Amendment by barring Congress from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

The yeshivas seek to stop the State from forcing parents to enroll their children in other schools and let parents meet the state’s “compulsory education obligations” via “a combination of sources,” as a lower court found, like home schooling or other instruction. “New York has no right to hamper Jewish education or to insist on secularizing and standardizing Jewish schools,” the yeshivas say. The First Amendment offers ample justification for their appraisal.