Talmud Torah Tashbar – unorthodox London Jewish School ordered to close

This Jewish school has run for forty years and conducts lessons without using English.  It is still operating illegally despite being ordered to close. Based in Stamford Hill, London, the February 12 order to close has been ignored.  Children with rucksacks have been delivered and collected in a minibus and neighbours say there has been no difference. Investigations showed the curriculum – delivered entirely in Hebrew, encouraged “cultural and ethnic insularity because it is so narrow and almost exclusively rooted in the study of the Torah”. On top of this the school had an “unpleasant and pervasive smell” broken windows, torn carpets, holes in the walls and no health and safety policy and a blank admissions register. A former pupil who grew up not speaking English said “What’s funny is, when I grew up, I didn’t have any other conceptions of education.  I thought that childhood is meant to be a bitter, sad, tortuous period in your life”.

Jay Harman of the British Humanist Association is working on all schools found to provide a woefully inadequate and insular education to be closed and remain so. Children who have been to these schools are subjected to indoctrination and denial of even the most basic learning beyond the study of scripture.

Anyone who has evidence that an illegal school is operating should provide it to us or Ofsted immediately said a Department for Education spokeswoman.

A man who answered the phone at Tashbar said, “There is no one here with time to speak to a journalist”.