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New York|Yeshiva University Reverses Itself and Bans L.G.B.T.Q. Club
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/nyregion/yeshiva-university-lgbtq-club-ban.html
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The Orthodox Jewish university had reached a settlement with the club in March but said the group had violated the agreement by “operating as a pride club under a different name.”
May 12, 2025, 4:41 p.m. ET
Two months after Yeshiva University said it would recognize an L.G.B.T.Q. student club on campus, bringing a yearslong legal battle to an end, the school has reversed course and banned the organization.
The school said the club, once known as the Pride Alliance but renamed Hareni earlier this year, had violated both Jewish principles and the legal settlement. But lawyers for the students said it was leaders at the school, a Modern Orthodox Jewish institution with campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx, who had violated the agreement with hostile religious rhetoric.
In a letter to the community on Friday, the university repeated an argument it made unsuccessfully in state court in 2022, saying its undergraduate programs are “fundamentally religious.”
The school said that “recent actions and statements” from the student club had led administrators to believe that it was “operating as a pride club under a different name and as such is antithetical to the Torah values of our yeshiva, as well as in violation of the approved guidelines and of the terms of the settlement agreement.”
“There is no place for such a club in yeshiva,” the letter continued, using the general term for a Jewish educational institution.
Yeshiva’s decision in March to recognize the club had seemed to end the legal battle, which had plunged a university in one of the country’s most liberal cities into a nationwide debate over religious freedom, civil rights and whether houses of worship, religiously affiliated organizations or even pious individuals could be compelled to provide public accommodations to people with differing views.
