Yeshiva Torah Temimah is an Orthodoxyeshiva with branches in Brooklyn, New York and Lakewood, New Jersey that was founded and is run by Rabbi Lipa Margolis. Rabbi Shlomo Feivel Shustal taught the highest level students of the school until August 2014, when he left to open his own Talmudic seminary called Yeshiva Neos Yaakov. The highest level students are currently being taught by Rabbi Betzalel Busel. Located on Ocean Parkway in Flatbush, the school was founded as Yeshiva Torah Vodaath of Flatbush; and it began operating under the name Yeshiva Torah Temimah in 1976. The institution grew to social prominence between 1980 and 2000. The school provides a combined religious and secular single-sex education to approximately 750 male students, including training in talmud, musar literature, history, classical Jewish scholarship and literature, mathematics, language arts and sciences.
Students
The New York branch of the school consists of two buildings. One of them houses approximately 650 boys ranging in age from nursery school through the twelfth grade; the school maintains a separate building for tertiary study, with an additional enrollment of about 100 students. It has a student-teacher ratio of approximately nineteen to one, and is staffed by renowned teachers and rabbis.
Alumni
Graduates of the school generally pursue further Talmudic education in such institutions as the Brisk yeshiva and Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem, as well as Beth Medrash Govoha in New Jersey, with a significant percentage of school alumni occupying rabbinic pulpits and positions of Jewish education. They also attend prestigious universities such as Harvard law.
Controversies
The yeshiva made headlines when one of its teachers and assistant principal, Joel Kolko, was charged in 2006 with sexually abusing two first-graders and forcing an adult former student to touch him during a visit to the school. Six former students also filed suit against the yeshiva, alleging the school administrators knew about Kolko’s molestation of students for decades, but sought to cover it up and intimidate students who spoke out. Kolko later pleaded guilty to two lesser counts of child endangerment and was sentenced to three years' probation, and has since left the school. The suit also alleged that school principal Lipa Margulies waged a "a campaign of intimidation, concealment and misrepresentations designed to prevent victims from filing lawsuits." Four of the lawsuits were dismissed for being filed beyond the then five year statute of limitations. In October, 2016 it was reported that the school had reached a $2.1 million settlement on the two remaining cases. In August, 2019 Baruch Sandhaus filed a lawsuit under the Child Victims Act against Yeshiva Torah Temimah, Kolko and Yoel Falk, alleging that Kolko and Falk sexually abused him around 1980 with the knowledge of the yeshiva and Margulies. In December, 2019 an additional lawsuit was filed under the Child Victims Act against the school and Margulies by a "John Doe" plaintiff alleging that Kolko sexually abused him in 1994 while he was a student at the yeshiva.
