YU Declines Invitation to Conservative High Schools

The Yeshiva University Red Sarachek Memorial Tournament, widely considered to be the preeminent Jewish high school basketball tourney in North America, is to be held at the Max Stern Athletic Center this March. The tournament, which is conducted under the aegis of the Office of Admissions, will feature seventeen secondary school squads from diverse geographic locales in heated competition for the trophy which effectively confers Jewish national highschool championship status on the victorious team. Despite expressions of interest on the part of local Solomon Schechter high schools, YU declined to extend these Conservative Jewish institutions invitations to the competition.

This development comes in the wake of the clamor generated over a recent decision by the "Yeshiva League," a loose association of centrist Orthodox high schools in the metropolitan New York City area that coordinates joint athletic competition, to reject Solomon Schechter’s bid for a league entry. The Conservative schools indicated that they would prefer to compete in a league comprised of other Jewish teams rather than enter one dominated by non-Jewish parochial schools.

Meryl Wiener, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Solomon Schechter High School of New York, feels that her school’s exclusion from the Red Sarachek tournament is unacceptable. "If you are not inviting us because we are a Conservative school, then that is shameful...Who are you hurting by doing this? A ninth grader who has to give up his basketball career because he goes to a Jewish school."

YU Director of Admissions, Michael Kranzler, emphatically denied that the decision not to invite Solomon Schechter was directly relevant to that schools denominational orientation. "We invite the schools that traditionally express interest in sending us their students." Kranzler explained that the objective of the tournament is to recruit high school students for eventual University attendance. Since Solomon Schechter has not sent, nor in Kranzler's estimation, encouraged many of its students to enroll in YU, the school is "not of value recruitment wise" and was on these grounds not invited.

Kranzler acknowledged that Bialik High School, a non-denominational institution in Montreal with perhaps a handful of Orthodox students, was invited to the Red Sarachek Tournament last year. He asserted, however, that Bialik was for his purposes distinguishable from Solomon Schechter in that the administration of the Canadian school expressed an "interest in sending students to YU and having its students exposed to an Orthodox environment." Not so Solomon Schechter, according to Kranzler, who noted that the Conservative school did not ideologically align itself with YU.

A solitary Bialik student is currently enrolled at YU. A Commentator interview revealed that his decision to attend the University was not influenced by his high school’s participation in the Red Sarachek Tournament.

Wiener observed that the Conservative movement’s decision to pursue day school education more vigorously was intended to result in the creation of more Solomon Schechter high schools. She wondered why "the Orthodox, who came up with the idea for day school education - a wonderful idea - are not supportive of our efforts to further Jewish education." With the emergence of more non-Orthodox high schools on the horizon, current concerns are not likely to soon disappear.