Investigators couldn’t find yeshiva — so they gave up: critics

City probers who were supposed to be looking into shoddy instruction at Brooklyn yeshivas found a butcher shop on the ground floor of an address listed for one school that got nearly $10 million in federal funding — so they never followed up, critics said Monday.

Officials passed on vetting the United Talmudical Academy on Lee Avenue after determining that the site was all ribeyes and no religion, according to a report issued last week.

But yeshiva reform group YAFFED said that with just a little more effort — like looking up at the building’s top floors — investigators would have found that the school’s administrative offices occupied at least one of them.

UTA even had a marked mailbox at the site, YAFFED founder Naftuli Moster said.

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“I can’t help but wonder if the city did due diligence and came to these conclusions on their own or if they just accepted what the yeshiva leaders said to them,” Moster said at a City Hall rally Monday.

Detractors of yeshivas assert that some of the Jewish religious schools deprive students of necessary basic educational instruction.

Supporters, claiming religious persecution, counter that they have a constitutional right to stress piety for their kids instead of secular academics.

Under mounting pressure, the city launched a probe into the schools three years ago and released limited findings last week.

While Moster praised city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza for finally producing the study, the activist said it appears to have been commandeered by yeshiva officials.

Moster stressed that 15 schools denied access to DOE staffers, while others fudged their profiles in order to elude scrutiny.

Nine of the schools that blocked access received millions in federal funding, records show.

The report was “a much-needed affirmation that a serious problem exists at many ultra-orthodox and Hasidic yeshivas and our allegations have been corroborated in it,” Moster said.

“There’s only one reason the yeshivas would bar the city from entering,” he said. “They are hiding something.”

A lawyer for the yeshivas, Avi Schick, has repeatedly denied any stonewalling on the part of the schools.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking at an unrelated press conference Monday, said Schick had his facts wrong.

“We repeatedly asked, they were evasive, they were unhelpful, he was unhelpful,” he said. “He should knock it off also. Let us into the schools so we can do our work.”

De Blasio added that funding for many yeshiva programs is mandated by state law and that some have shown a willingness to bolster secular education.

But CUNY education professor David Bloomfield, who joined Moster at City Hall, said the probe amounts to little more than political theater.

Loath to alienate a powerful voting bloc, Bloomfield said, de Blasio has purposefully muddled and dragged out the probe.

“This investigation for over three years has been slow-walked, it’s been deferential, and it’s been inconclusive,” he said, arguing that educational “malfeasance” at many yeshivas is inarguable.

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