Yossi Newfield, 37, unemployed

I was almost fired . . . because I didn’t know how many zeroes [are in] 1,000,000.

His father earned an MD from Harvard Medical School. But Yossi Newfield stopped learning English — and all secular studies — at age 9.

“I could have been a doctor — if only I’d had a science class,” he said. “But there was no science. Zero. My yeshiva didn’t even teach the ABCs.”

In fact, he revealed, “I was almost fired from my first job [as an executive assistant] because I didn’t know how many zeroes [you write for] 1,000,000.”

Newfield was educated at the elite Oholei Torah yeshiva in Crown Heights. His formerly non-observant parents — his father is a dermatologist — had moved to the neighborhood, where Newfield still resides, after turning to the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch movement as young adults.

“My father, who got the best education in the world, knows better than anybody how important an education is,” said Newfield. “It’s so hard to comprehend how he ... sent me and my brothers to a school that did not teach the English language.” From ages 9 to 17, only Yiddish was allowed to be spoken inside Newfield’s classroom. He learned “basic reading” only until about third grade.

He said the only reason he knew all 50 states as a child was from his baseball-card collection, adding, “I don’t think I knew the president’s name.”

At his yeshiva, there was supposed to be an hour or two of secular studies, but Newfield said that “if the teacher . . . didn’t want to teach or was bored, they would put on the same ‘Pinocchio’ video.”

The second of nine children, he recalls being “terribly envious” when he would see his five sisters coming home with biology and algebra textbooks. “I only knew [the word] ‘chemistry’ because I saw it on their textbooks.”

While yeshiva boys study Talmud from 7:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m., girls split their time between religious and secular classes.

After finishing yeshiva at 17, Newfield was sent by his parents to religious finishing schools around the world to continue his Talmudic studies — and that’s how he discovered just how much he was really missing. While studying at a yeshiva in New Jersey, he was told that “the local public library is off limits to every student in this room.” But at a public library in Melbourne, Australia, he came across the works of Henry Roth and Philip Roth, whom he now considers his favorite authors. “It opened up a whole new world,” he said.

Inspired, Newfield — who at age 23 could only count to 20 — “fought” to catch up, studying math, science and English around the clock to earn his GED. “It’s very hard when you’re 23 to start learning [multiplication],” he said. “Had I learned this at a young age, it would have been second nature.”

He earned a bachelor’s in history at Touro College a few years later and went on to work as a paralegal at an immigration-law firm, earning $39,000 a year. (He is currently between jobs.)

“My main goal is to be self-sufficient — not dependent on handouts,” Newfield said. “I have a friend in Section 8 [housing] with a three-bedroom apartment and 11 kids. I lent him $2,000 for his daughter’s bat mitzvah.”

Although he is currently single, Newfield hopes he can provide his own future children with a rich education.

“I would definitely give my kids a dual curriculum,” he said. “I want them to have opportunity — to know science, math, English. A worldly knowledge.”

Walking by his old school, he looks at the building with despair. “The only thing these kids could do is be rabbis,” he said. “The Talmud says, ‘ One who doesn’t teach his son a trade, is as if he teaches him to steal.’ But religion is not a trade.”