Days after Yeshiva University made a joint announcement with a student group that the private, flagship Modern Orthodox Jewish educational institution would recognize an official LGBT student group, both the school’s president and one of its most senior rabbinic deans say that they have regrets, though it is not clear that they are apologetic for the same reasons.
Yeshiva and the students settled a five-year court case on March 20 and stated that the new club, Hareni, “will seek to support LGBTQ students and their allies and will operate in accordance with the approved guidelines of Yeshiva University’s senior rabbis.” Hayley Goldberg, co-president of the club, told JNS that “this victory is not just for our club” but is “for every student who deserves a safe space to be themselves.”
In a statement at the time, a Yeshiva spokesman said that the students had agreed to “the same club approved by our senior rabbis two and a half years ago.”
In an open letter dated 24 Adar, which began on Sunday night, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a faculty member at the school who is one of the most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis to issue religious rulings, wrote that “two and a half years ago, when I was last consulted, I gave my blessing to a Yeshiva University initiative to help students struggling with problems of same sex attraction and gender identity.”
“My position, then as now, emphatically rejects the ideology, lifestyle and behaviors which the LGBTQ term represents,” he wrote. (JNS verified the letter’s authenticity.)
His view remains that religious prohibitions, including on same-sex marriage, “obviously must be uncompromisingly upheld,” the rabbi added in the letter. “Simultaneously, all halachically legitimate means of support should be provided to struggling students to foster and sustain their uncompromising commitment to all of the above.”
“Experience has attested that allowing this initiative to take the form of a club has and continues to create confusion,” Schachter wrote. “I very much regret that I did not previously recognize this factor. Establishing any additional club in any Orthodox institution will only add to that confusion and must be avoided.”
Ari Berman, a rabbi and Yeshiva’s president who like Schachter holds the title of rosh yeshiva—which the Yeshiva website defines as “professor of Talmud”—at the school’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, wrote in his own statement to the Yeshiva community that he wanted to “deeply apologize.”
“Over the past few days there has been much confusion about YU’s policies following the announcement of Hareni as an undergraduate student club,” Berman stated in the letter sent on Tuesday.
“I deeply apologize to the members of our community—our students and parents, alumni and friends, faculty and rabbis—for the way the news was rolled out,” Berman wrote. “Instead of clarity, it sowed confusion. Even more egregiously, misleading ‘news’ articles said that Yeshiva had reversed its position, which is absolutely untrue.” (It wasn’t clear why the statement put “news” in quotes or to which outlets the YU president referred. JNS sought comment from Yeshiva.)
Berman noted that undergraduates opt to come to Yeshiva, rather than other schools, due to its “religiously driven environment and curriculum.”
“The Yeshiva has always conveyed that what a Pride club represents is antithetical to the undergraduate program in which the traditional view of marriage and genders being determined at birth are transmitted,” Berman said. “The Yeshiva never could and never would sanction such an undergraduate club, and it is due to this that we entered litigation.”
The Yeshiva president stated that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit agreed to run the club Hareni, which Yeshiva has said is the same as a club launched by the university in 2022, and that the case has been dismissed.
“Last week, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against YU accepted to run Hareni, instead of what they were originally suing us for, moved to end the case, and the case has been dismissed,” Berman said.
“For years, this has been a deeply painful episode for so many people in our Yeshiva family. I am pleased that at this time, it is drawing to a close,” he added.
Hareni has denied that the club is the same as the one Yeshiva proposed in 2022, which was to be called Kol Yisrael Areivim. JNS sought comment repeatedly from Yeshiva and from senior rabbis, including Schachter. It was not clear from the public materials if Schachter currently supports the new group, whether other senior rabbis at Yeshiva did or do or what exactly Berman was so deeply apologetic about.
“We should not run to label people based upon what they believe about themselves or their bodies,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS. “An individual’s desire to adopt a lifestyle at variance with Torah observance is something that both deserves and requires consultation with an individual rav.”
Yeshiva created the club Kol Yisrael Areivim—which it said would be “for LGBTQ students striving to live authentic Torah lives” and was “approved by the administration, in partnership with lay leadership, and endorsed by senior roshei yeshiva”—in 2022, the year after the proposed student group YU Pride Alliance sued the university’s president and vice provost, alleging that Yeshiva denied the club official recognition.
Yeshiva calls itself “the world’s flagship Jewish university” and says that it is “rooted in Jewish thought and tradition.” U.S. News & World Report, which has ranked colleges and universities for decades, told JNS that Yeshiva did not report a religious affiliation in the data provided for the rankings.
The Pride Alliance rejected Kol Yisrael Areivim, stating that the club did not meet its intended goals of creating a safe, supportive space for students. In 2022, the New York Supreme Court ruled that YU had to implement the Pride Alliance, to which the University responded by halting funding to all clubs on campus.