Wilf family, whose name adorns Yeshiva U.’s main campus, criticizes school’s efforts to block LGBTQ club

(New York Jewish Week) — A serious donor to Yeshiva College has come out in opposition to Yeshiva College’s resolution to not acknowledge an LGBTQ group as an official campus membership. 

Its first public assertion on the problem, launched solely to the New York Jewish Week, the Wilf Household Foundations, for whom the Fashionable Orthodox college’s fundamental campus in Washington Heights is called, weighed in on authorized efforts by Y.U. to forestall the YU Pleasure Alliance from getting recognition and funding.  

“As foundations grounded in our Jewish religion and values, we steadfastly stand for tolerance, inclusion and justice, and reject discrimination of every kind,” the muse mentioned in an announcement. “We strongly disagree with Y.U.’s resolution to not acknowledge the Pleasure Alliance and have expressed that disagreement to Y.U.’s management from the start.” 

The assertion from the Wilf Household Foundations — whose benefactors are an prolonged New Jersey household that made its fortune in actual property, and whose members embody the homeowners of the Minnesota Vikings — joins a rising refrain of disapproval from many with relationships to the Fashionable Orthodox flagship college. 

Among the many dissenters are greater than 1,000 alumni, college and college students who’ve signed a widely-circulated letter urging the administration to rethink its actions. The letter cites Talmud teachings to induce the college to “perceive this section of our neighborhood and its wants.” 

The Wilf Household Foundations assertion comes as Yeshiva College and the YU Pleasure Alliance each assert their positions in court docket. A New York decide had ordered the college, which is formally chartered as a secular establishment, to right away acknowledge the membership. When the U.S. Supreme Courtroom basically sustained that order and urged its decision in decrease courts, the college introduced it will droop all membership exercise moderately than acknowledge the Pleasure Alliance. 

On Wednesday, the YU Pleasure Alliance mentioned it will not press the problem outdoors of the courtroom in the interim, saying it didn’t need to see different golf equipment “punished” by the college.

In latest weeks, further letters and statements expressing solidarity with LGBTQ college students and disappointment within the college’s actions have been addressed to Yeshiva College President Ari Berman. The undergraduate college printed a letter on Sept. 16 proclaiming their assist for the college’s LGBTQ college students.

Comparable letters have been penned by the Y.U.’s affiliated graduate applications, together with colleges on the Cardozo Faculty of Legislation, the Wurzweiler Faculty of Social Work and the Ferkauf Graduate Faculty of Psychology, in addition to a letter from the Board of Overseers at Cardozo, and from the Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Montefiore Medical Heart and Y.U.’s affiliated Albert Einstein Faculty of Drugs. 

“What we’re seeing is that the neighborhood at massive — Yeshiva’s graduate colleges, Y.U. college, skilled psychiatrists and psychologists at Einstein and Montefiore — are all coming collectively and saying “that is unacceptable,” Tai Miller, a plaintiff in YU Pleasure Alliance’s case in opposition to the college, advised the New York Jewish Week. “Yeshiva’s actions are harming college students. It’s treating college students like second-class residents.”

For its half, Y.U. has maintained that it cares deeply for its LGBTQ college students. President Berman has launched a number of statements saying, partly, “our dedication to and love for our LGBTQ college students are unshakeable,” and “we welcome and care deeply for all our college students, together with our LGBTQ neighborhood.”

Berman has mentioned that recognizing an LGBTQ membership is “not in step with [Y.U.’s] Torah values.” Nevertheless, his statements additionally replicate efforts in lots of Fashionable Orthodox settings to accommodate LGBTQ neighborhood members, regardless of being unable to sanction gay habits below their interpretation of Jewish regulation.  

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The controversy additionally represents a rigidity between Y.U.’s official standing as a secular college that accepts public funding for its graduate and different applications, but additionally ordains Orthodox rabbis and whose undergraduate program is designed to be intensely non secular. 

Supporters of Y.U.’s resolution embody alumni like Rabbi Rafi Eis, who in a latest subject of the campus newspaper The Commentator wrote that liberal values conflict with Y.U.’s position as a non secular establishment. “Y.U. can’t preserve its non secular requirements and outline itself as secular,” wrote Eis, who acquired his ordination from Y.U.’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, or RIETS. “Down the highway, there will probably be additional conflicts, like whether or not to just accept transgender females into Stern Faculty dormitories or transgender males into Yeshiva Faculty.”

In one other Commentator piece, Rabbi Rodney Elisha Weiss, an educator who can be an alum of Y.U. and acquired his ordination at RIETS, known as calls for to acknowledge an LGBTQ membership an “assault on my house.”

“Y.U. has been such a particular place of Torah. Why demand that we violate our valuable Torah and validate this group’s agenda in our neighborhood?” he wrote. “Ought to we empathize with this group? Ought to we invite them to return to shul, the Bais Medrash [study hall], our smachot (the synagogue, the home of studying, our celebrations)? The reply is a convincing sure. However to ask Y.U. to take a place in opposition to the Torah is unfair.”

In response to YU Information, a publication of the college’s public affairs division, the Wilf household has been among the many college’s “most beneficiant philanthropists” for the final three a long time. The household has established two main scholarship funds for undergraduates — one for need-based college students and one for distinguished students. In 2002, Y.U. renamed its all-male undergraduate Washington Heights campus the Wilf Campus in honor of the household. The Wilfs have additionally established a cardiovascular analysis middle on the college’s Albert Einstein Faculty of Drugs campus.

“We proceed to be actively engaged in discussions with the management of Yeshiva College to strongly encourage them to take fast steps to grant YU Pleasure Alliance’s request for Membership standing,” their assertion provides.