From what passes for Sephardi among the echelons of the Rabbinic leadership. Via the the Jewish worker and the Jerusalem Post,Rabbi Shalom Cohen the spiritual leader of Shas (the Sephardi Haredi political party -it pains me to put Sephardi and Haredi together in a sentence, it really does!) has ostensibly banned Sephardi-Haredi women from attending academic colleges :
The letter goes -
"We are witnesses today that there are students who learned in [Charedi] seminars who are applying and requesting to learn academic studies.
Our Rabbis, the Gedolei Yisroel, completely opposed academic studies even in Charedi colleges since a number of the lecturers are university graduates and don't have the pure torah ideology that we are raised on.
Likewise, the coursework in the colleges is based on academic and scientific methodologies which contradict daas torah.
Therefore, female students should not even consider going to learn academic studies in any setting, because this is not the path of Torah."
This is ironic for 2 reasons.
First one of the great Sephardi Rabbis, Moses Maimonides, was himself a man of science and medicine and firmly advocated that there was no contradiction between science and Torah, indeed he opined that the Torah was misunderstood if science contradicted it.
The second is that the actual founder of the Shas founder Rabbi Ovadia Yosef explicitly approved the establishment of institutions of higher learning designed for haredim, including the one founded by his eldest daughter, Dr. Adina Bar-Shalom.
As for myself. Oy, I've printed off the edict and ignored it. I'm Sephardi & Orthodox. This belongs in the toilet. But we'd wipe more on than we'd get off,if you get my drift, apologises for the crudeness, but it is the only way I can rationalise this BS. I've been married twice, my first wife had a degree and went on to further studies, my second wife is also university educated. I have 4 sisters. All of them are educated to Masters level, 2 to PhD. All of them are devout Jews, in their own way. My eldest daughter is currently reading English at University. I have no time for these idiots that are trying to ban women from being educated.
I'd like to add the word especially given the Haredi setup of men studying the Torah and expecting women to earn money via a job & look after a family in the traditional Jewish way. This is a tall order if you ask me, I have no problem with both partners earning and taking joint responsibility for child raising, but it is TOO MUCH to except anyone to be in effect a single parent, but married at the same time... OK it isn't my community, but if you are Haredi and this is what you do; you aren't going to help the situation or your poverty by denying the main bread winner an education to get a better job, to support the family etc.
