D.C. officials have halted work on what its founder hopes will be the city’s only yeshiva, or stand-alone Jewish study center, after regulators found a two-story building under construction — not the “enlarged family room” for which the city had given a permit.
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld announced late last year that he was leaving his longtime pulpit, Ohev Sholom, the District’s largest Orthodox synagogue, to found Yeshivas Reb Elimelech on a quiet residential street in the Northwest Washington neighborhood of Shepherd Park.
The yeshiva Herzfeld imagines will be something that experts say doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in the country: An Orthodox yeshiva that welcomes people of all religious backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations to study together. And if they qualify, it will offer them types of ordination. The idea is for these people to learn Jewish texts in the intensive, traditional style that today is done almost exclusively among super-Orthodox males.
Source: Planned alternative yeshiva in D.C. is hit with stop-work order