Facebook can certainly become a breeding ground for impropriety quicker than you can even spell “impropri–” but those lowbrow kicks usually don’t cost you anything. If you happen to attend an all-girl Hasidic school in a particular Brooklyn neighborhood, though, checking in on the site could land you a fine of one hundred cool ones.
Beis Rivkah High School in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, does not approve of the use of Facebook by its female students and, in order to get its disapproval across, fined 33 different students $100 for using the site. But why’s the social networking site so severely frowned upon by the school? According to the New York Daily News, the school’s head administrator and issuer of fines Rabbi Benzion Stock said, “It’s not a modest thing for a Jewish girl — or man or woman or student or father to be on. There is a lack of privacy and dignity.”
Well, I don’t think anybody could really argue with that – after all, “lack of privacy and dignity” might as well be the motto sewn on the coat of arms for Facebook.
The school banned the site several years ago and this year went so far as to require every student in the school to sign a formal contract stating that they would not use the site. Stock emphasized the meaning of the contract: “We have an eternal ban. A ban from whenever it started.”
There is a rainbow at the end of this tear-rained road, though: the $100 will be returned to each penalized student at the end of the school year.
No word on when the Facebook could be returned, but inferring from Rabbi Stock’s “eternal” measure of the ban, I don’t think eternity has an expiration date. Sorry, kids.
[Via MSNBC.]