New Hasidic song slams yeshivas that reject students who don’t fit in
Moishe Wassner playing a rejected yeshiva student in the music video “Loy Niskabel”
A new Yiddish hip-hop song has appeared on YouTube sharply criticizing Hasidic yeshivas who refuse to accept students whom they consider at risk of going “off the derech,” or leaving the community. The video, which was released on Aug. 26, seems to have touched a nerve, since it’s garnered over 12,000 views in the first five days.
The song, which is accompanied by English subtitles, is sung from the perspective of a Hasidic father who suspects that the reason his son was not accepted into the yeshiva has less to do with his behavior than with the fact that his family is too poor to give generous donations to the school.
The man who raps “Loy Niskabel” (“Not Accepted”) goes by the stage name of “Min HaSeore” or “From the Whirlwind.”
Forverts contributor Yehoshua Kahane, who was raised in a Hasidic community in Antwerp, praised the song. “Even though it never happened to me, I had heard that this kind of thing happened,” he said in an interview.
The painstricken call of the father in the video shows how meaningful yeshiva acceptance is to a Hasidic child. Kahane said that when a student is rejected from a yeshiva, it can lead to an emotional crisis since it calls into question the student’s relationship with God, his Hasidic group and himself, not to mention the quality of his family lineage.
The issue of students being ostracized by the Hasidic community was brought to the forefront in 2009 by the late Michoel Schnitzler, whose famous song “Der Bochur’s Tzava’a,” (“The Boy’s Will”), commonly known as “Track 5,” was a protest against rabbis and educators who rejected students because of their non-conformism. But “Loy Niskabel” takes it further, charging that it’s not just a matter of close-mindedness, but a sign of corruption.