In a remarkable reversal after a years-long legal battle, Yeshiva University (YU), the private Orthodox Jewish university with four campuses in New York City, said on Thursday that it would recognize an LGBTQ+ student club on campus.

The decision ends a legal and moral dispute that was litigated in multiple jurisdictions and even reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Yeshiva had refused for years to recognize the club, known then as the Yeshiva University Pride Alliance.  

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In a statement, the school said a new club formed with student and university input “will seek to support L.G.B.T.Q. students and their allies and will operate in accordance with the approved guidelines of Yeshiva University’s senior rabbis.”

“The club will be run like other clubs on campus,” the school added, “all in the spirit of a collaborative and mutually supportive campus culture.”

The school’s accommodating language and sudden turnabout hides the years of opposition the school mounted against the club’s inclusion alongside dozens of other school-sanctioned clubs at the university, including three other LGBTQ+ clubs affiliated with Yeshiva graduate programs, Yeshiva Law School among them.

The school shut down all student clubs for a brief period following a court order to reinstate YU Pride Alliance.

“I think this will really show to other people that there is no separation between being queer and being a Jew and that you are allowed to be a queer Jew on campus at Yeshiva University,” Hayley Goldberg, one of the new club’s co-presidents, told The New York Times.

The new club group will be known as Hareni, a name taken from a phrase recited before Jewish prayer that reads, “I hereby take upon myself to fulfill the commandment of loving your fellow as yourself.”

For years, the university rejected student demands to recognize the previous club because doing so, administrators said, would conflict with Orthodox Jewish religious teaching. 

Students and alumni sued Yeshiva in 2021.  

The school argued in court that its refusal was legally protected because it was exempt from New York’s civil rights laws as a Jewish religious institution.

The court disagreed, finding that the school’s charter identifies it as an “educational corporation” and not a religious one. It ordered the club reinstated.

The case reached the Supreme Court in 2022 when Yeshiva filed an emergency petition to stay the lower court’s order.

Yeshiva argued the lower court’s decision was an “unprecedented intrusion into Yeshiva’s church autonomy” and that the school “cannot comply with that order because doing so would violate its sincere religious beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values.”

The high court declined 5-4 to take up the case, with Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the liberal minority.

When Yeshiva chose to shut down all 87 clubs on campus rather than reinstate Yeshiva Pride, the attorney for the group, Katie Rosenfeld, called it “a throwback to 50 years ago when the city of Jackson, Mississippi closed all public swimming pools rather than comply with court orders to desegregate.”

Soon after, a New York appeals court affirmed the lower court’s decision and again ordered Yeshiva to recognize the LGBTQ+ student group.

Schneur Friedman, 22, another co-president of the new club, called the university’s change in direction “a massive step.”

“The fact that this is happening very much within the guidelines of Yeshiva is significant,” he said.

“If this can happen here, it has wider implication for the Orthodox Jewish community as a whole,” he added. “Even if there are compromises, it has a wide effect, which is very exciting.”

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