Over 100 Jewish kids in the San Fernando Valley go to the right-wing Toras Emes (Yeshiva Rav Isacsohn Torath Emeth) in Beverly La Brea:
….includes 1,100 students in preschool to eighth grade, 240 staff members, five different buildings in the Beverly La Brea area and an annual budget of $6 million.
Over the past 50 years, the school’s growth has been synchronous with the expansion of the ultra-Orthodox community in Los Angeles as a whole. In the 1950s, there was only a handful of synagogues that served the ultra-Orthodox community, and even fewer schools. Today, the ultra-Orthodox community has dozens of synagogues, several kollels and other community infrastructure.
That’s about 90-minutes in the car every day. There’s a need in the Valley for a right-wing academy. Emek Hebrew Academy-Teichman Family Torah Center in Sherman Oaks is centrist. It’s a victim of its own success. It’s big. Parents who wouldn’t otherwise send their kids to a Jewish day school do, including a lot of secular Israelis. Children of Orthodox parents will go over to another home and drive on Shabbos.
"Harkham Hillel has the worst reputation," says one parent. "Parents who send their kids to Maimonides wouldn’t send their kid to Hillel if it was a way of avoiding the Holocaust. I don’t know what happened but people are getting the hell out of there. They let it go to the Persians. If you go to their house, their mother is wearing the hot pants and the cleavage. So many people in Beverlywood (near Hillel) send their kids across town to Maimonides. Emek, there’s probably too many Israelis who aren’t Orthodox enough."
Shalhevet is a bastion for the white Jews who want to avoid their duskier co-religionists.
"Maimonides has a teaching program that all the parents rave about."
"All the growth is to the right."
