[1] Currently located in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, YCT's mission is to educate and place rabbis who are "open, non-judgmental, knowledgeable, empathetic, and eager to transform Orthodoxy into a movement that meaningfully and respectfully interacts with all Jews, regardless of affiliation, commitment, or background.
"[2] Its core values include a passionate commitment to the study of Torah and the scrupulous observance of halakha (Jewish law); intellectual openness and critical thinking in one's religious life; expanding the role of women in Judaism; commitment to the broader Jewish community; and a responsibility to improve the world and to care for every human being in it regardless of faith.
The origins of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah go back to 1996 when Rabbis Avi Weiss and Saul Berman founded a program known as MeORoT that provided supplemental lectures on issues in liberal Orthodoxy to rabbinical students enrolled in Yeshiva University.
In September 1999, Weiss and Linzer launched Yeshivat Chovevei Torah as an undergraduate learning program primarily for students at Columbia University and Barnard College.
After spending five years housed at Columbia's Hillel, the school left Manhattan in the summer of 2010 and moved to the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.
[8] YCT graduates, who are not eligible for RCA membership, can join the International Rabbinic Fellowship, an organization co-founded in 2008 by Avi Weiss and Marc Angel.
[9] In the first 15 years of its history, YCT described itself as an Open Orthodox institution and its mission statement made heavy use of the term (Avi Weiss had coined it).
Whereas it is common in other rabbinical schools to offer a semester or year of pastoral counseling courses, YCT's program spans the entire four-year curriculum.
The pastoral counseling program is taught by leading psychiatric professionals and includes formal classroom instruction, role-playing, clinical experience, and mentored fieldwork.
[14] Other faculty members include rabbis Ysoscher Katz, Nathaniel Helfgot, Chaim Marder, Miriam Schacter, and Michelle Friedman.
[8] As of 2019, YCT has ordained over 130 rabbis serving throughout the U.S. and around the world in synagogues, on college campuses, as teachers and administrators, chaplains, religious entrepreneurs, leaders of Jewish institutions, and more.
However, YCT, unlike a number of rabbis and institutions within Orthodox Judaism, has promoted expanded roles for women in ritual life and religious leadership, in contravention of Jewish Law.
Founder Avi Weiss explained: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, as an Orthodox institution, requires that its students daven only in synagogues with mechitzot [partitions for the separation of men and women].
The phenomenon of women receiving aliyot in a mechitza minyan is currently being debated on both a halachic and communal level within the Modern Orthodox community.