In Israel, religious schools begin opening an old world to the new

Although he grew up in modern Israel, Menachem Bombach says he hardly spoke a word of Hebrew, the national language, until the age of 20.

In his cloistered ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, the spoken language was Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews since the Middle Ages.

Hebrew was reserved for prayer and the morning-to-night study of Jewish religious texts in the halls of his yeshiva seminary where he, like other ultra-Orthodox boys, was taught only enough math to count change at the store, and learned no English, science, or any other so-called secular subjects.

Twenty years later, Rabbi Bombach is leading a tour around a four-story limestone-clad building, home to what’s known as a “yeshiva high school.”

The simply named Hassidic Seminary is the flagship of the

National effortResistance to changeReviving a lost worldHunger for general knowledge