Telegraph
July 15, 2014
As many as a thousand boys aged 13 to 16 have disappeared from the registered school system in East London after their parents sent them to illegal religious schools where English is not spoken and academic subjects are not taught.
Government documents obtained by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Jewish Chronicle newspaper say that many of the schools are “operating illegally and without the most basic health, safety and child welfare checks”.
Many boys in the Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, London, “will stop secular studies at the age of 13 or 14 and start attending ‘yeshivas’ where the curriculum is solely religious,” the documents say.
Between 800 and 1000 boys aged between 13 and 16 are “missing” from the school system in the borough of Hackney alone, the papers add.
Undercover filming by Dispatches in and around the schools shows the boys packed more than 50 to a classroom in dirty, run-down buildings, some converted houses. More than a hundred boys were filmed going in to an illegal school in Lynmouth Road, Stamford Hill, arriving from 7.30 in the morning and leaving late at night. The establishment is believed to be one of twelve illegal schools in the neighbourhood.
Former pupils at the Hackney schools told Dispatches that they spoke entirely in Yiddish and that secular subjects were not taught. “I didn’t even know what the word science meant. I hadn’t heard this word before,” said one.
The former pupils said that one of the purposes of the schools was to ensure that children lacked any knowledge or skills which might enable them to leave the Orthodox enclave and lead a normal adult life outside.
“I was told terrible things about non-Jews,” said one former pupil.
“In order to keep such a vast number of people enclosed, they are indoctrinating from a very young age that everything outside is bad and evil. We didn’t come out with anything we could use in daily life or in the future. It bothers me that children are being taught so much lies and rubbish about the outside world.”