Yeshiva University High Schools of Los Angeles

Shortly before Rabbi Marvin Hier and his family arrived in Los Angeles in July 1977, he proposed establishing a school and a center to honor Simon Wiesenthal. YULA was intended to be an affiliate of Yeshiva University offering secondary and tertiary education, but ultimately, it became solely a high school. As time passed, the Los Angeles Orthodox Jewish community perceived that Hier had placed more attention on developing the Wiesenthal Center, as opposed to the educational center.[4] The school was ultimately founded in 1979.[5]

Yeshiva University of Los Angeles purchased a $2.25-million facility for high school classes, located on Robertson Boulevard, in late May 1990. Rabbi Hier had outbid Sephardic Jewish and Sikh organizations for the site. Prior to the purchase, Hier had asked for $5 million in additional federal funding for the Wiesenthal Center. In response, there were serious considerations for establishing a new Orthodox Jewish high school in Los Angeles, and some parents at YULA had threatened to remove their children.[4]

In mid-March 2020, YULA chose to follow the LAUSD into closing school campuses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While reopenings were planned for various dates throughout the year, when the LAUSD officially announced they would not be reopening for the remainder of the school year, YULA followed suit.[6] The school remained closed to in-person learning, with the exception of morning prayer for the Boys' School and afterschool programs, both of which are still in-person. On 10 November 2020, as flu season approached and as COVID-19 cases were on the rise in California, YULA announced that they would be opening the school to in-person, outdoor learning, staggering the grades to attend on different days.[7]

YULA has separate campuses for boys and girls within the Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles. The campus of the boys' school has 15 classrooms as well as a Beit Midrash and a Sephardic Beit Midrash which served as locations for davening and assemblies before the COVID-19 pandemic.[8] The campus of the girls' school also has 15 classrooms, as well as two science labs.

YULA Boys School Campus

The YULA curriculum is split into general (secular) studies and judaic studies components, providing both separate and cumulative GPAs for coursework completed.[9] Coursework that is placed as AP or Honors is given a one point boost on a GPA scale, assigning a score out of 5 instead of 4. This enables students to acquire cumulative or split GPAs greater than or equal to 4.0 without achieving straight "A's." In 2018, YULA offered 13 Advanced Placement classes.

Each school has a student body of approximately two hundred students from different areas of Los Angeles. Many students live in the Pico-Robertson and Beverlywood neighborhoods, and in the San Fernando Valley. The Boys' School has 29 full-time equivalent faculty,[1][10] while the Girls' School has 36 full-time equivalent faculty.[2][11]

• Ben Shapiro, American political commentator, columnist, author, radio talk show host, and attorney[13][14]
• Noam T. Wasserman, American dean, professor, and academic[15]

• History of the Jews in Los Angeles

• YULA.org
• Articles about "Yeshiva University High School" at Los Angeles Times