Below is the text of the email being sent:
I am a proud alumnus of a Yeshiva, and benefited from the religious, moral, ethical and intellectual education that I received there. Members of my community choose to send our children to Yeshivas, so that they might receive the same education and values that were provided to us. I am troubled by the invasive new guidelines issued by the New York State Education Department, which seek to alter the emphasis and undermine the autonomy of these schools. I am even more alarmed by the threats made by the State Education Commissioner to initiate truancy proceedings against parents and to close schools that do not conform to these new mandates.
This is government overreach of the worst order, and an unprecedented encroachment on the fundamental rights of parents and religious Jews.
Members of the Yeshiva community are caring and capable husbands, wives, parents, and law abiding citizens. Our traditional Yeshiva education has empowered us to succeed, even excel, in numerous professions and countless businesses. These successes are attributable to the skills, insights, philosophy, values and education imparted by the schools we attended. We are grateful to our parents and educators for this blessing; and there can be no moral authority sufficient to deny us the opportunity to offer the same to our own children.
As citizens of the United States we demand that the State protect and not undermine our rights – our rights as parents to direct the education of our children, and our rights as religious Jews to insist that our children receive the education that we choose for them and not one that is directed by the State.
I urge you to act immediately to repair the distrust that has emerged from this unilateral bureaucratic overreach and recognize the rich contribution of private, religious and parochial schools to New York.
{Your name & job title}
This email was manually submitted by the user via the Agudath Israel Yeshiva Education petition website.
