Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway

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The Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, or HAFTR, is a centrist Modern Orthodox Jewish day school on the South Shore of Long Island in New York serving students in preschool through twelfth grade. It is a private school, with its lower school located in Lawrence, and its high school in Cedarhurst, two of the Five Towns. Students study Jewish and secular subjects in a dual curriculum.

The pre-school, kindergarten, elementary and middle schools are located on one campus on a number of buildings with entrances on Washington Avenue, Central Avenue and Frost Lane in Lawrence. The high school is located on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst; the building being a former elementary school of the Lawrence Public Schools. Compared to other Jewish schools in the Five Towns, HAFTR is considered more centrist Orthodox than other local Jewish day schools and yeshivas, such as Hebrew Academy of Long Beach or Rambam Mesivta.

HAFTR was established in 1978 as the result of a merger between two schools on the South Shore of Long Island: The Hebrew Institute of Long Island (HILI) in Far Rockaway, Queens, which had served the Rockaway and Five Towns community since 1936; and the Hillel School, which was founded in Lawrence in 1957.^[1]

In both its middle school and high school buildings, HAFTR gives space to the Kulanu Torah Academy, a special education school.

On April 7, 2006, HAFTR announced that it would be joining with Rambam Mesivta (which is across the street from its elementary school) in an "educational partnership." The new partnership is called Machon HaTorah, and began operation at the commencement of the Fall 2006 semester.

[edit] Notable alumni

Lee Bienstock, a contestant on the fifth edition of the NBC reality show The Apprentice, where he was the runner-up to winner Sean Yazbeck.^[2]
Joseph Stern, British Marshall Scholar, 1999.^[3] Author of Euler's Triangle Determination Problem^[4], Forum Geometricorum^[5], Vol. 7 (2007)