Israeli Religious Schools - Not For Ethiopian Students? December 6, 2007

Today on Missing the Point: Israeli Knesset Member Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor).

Pines-Paz misses the gigantic pink elephant of religious school reform in the room, and instead advocates that, to remedy the poor treatment of Ethiopian students in religious schools, simply moving the students to secular schools.

Like I said, file this Ha’aretz piece by Ruth Sinai under “Missing the Point”:

Placing Ethiopian immigrant children in religious schools “has greatly harmed the group’s integration into the wider society, and has left them a coerced religious sector,” Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz said yesterday.

Due to the Chief Rabbinate’s strict conversion requirements, the majority of Ethiopian children attend state religious schools.

“No ethnic group or immigrant group is required to study in one system. We need to stop discriminating against the Ethiopian sector and to endlessly find faults with their Jewishness,” Pines-Paz said in initiating a bill to facilitate secular education for Ethiopian children.

This week, a state religious school in Petah Tikva was found to have isolated four second-grade Ethiopian pupils from the other children, teaching them in a separate classroom and scheduling their recess at a different hour. The school reportedly said the Ethiopian children were not religious enough to mix with the other children.

“Although it is very late, the time has come to redeem the [Ethiopian] sector from the isolation that was forced upon it,” Pines-Paz said.

Not religious enough?? Where anyone gets off making such an assessment in a religious school where all students are bound to the same code of dress and conduct is beyond me. They’re not shomer Shabbat? Shomer kashrut? Who are these Torah giants that are these other kids’ parents?

I would think that this would show, with stark clarity, how bad that 2nd-grade teacher needed to be fired. I would think that this would show how badly that school needed a new principal. I would think that this would show how far the State Religious School system has strayed from achieving its goal of providing a Torah education for all G-d-fearing families who so desire it for their children. I would think that this would show how badly reform is needed in the dati school system.

Perhaps this could be fixed with legislation. Perhaps some sort of oversight commission is the key, or maybe increased parent involvement could fix the schools. The key word is “fix the schools”.

Instead, Ophir Pines-Paz has chosen to advocate taking these children out of the school, and the Torah out of their curricula, and putting them in secular schools. This assumes that - a) the racism that was the root cause of their inferior treatment in the religious school somehow won’t be there in secular schools, and b) that this is just the status quo for religious schools, who should be left to arbitrarily choose when to segregate students like this.

Getting rid of Torah education as an alternative for Ethiopian students is not an option. Nor is advocating a Torah-free alternative as an option for religious Ethiopian students. The Chief Rabbinate and religious education system must be made to provide equal Torah education for all its students, and to treat all its students with dignity. If a child truly isn’t religious, then this should be examined — without respect to color or ancestry.

The Jews will come back from all four corners of the Earth — looking quite differently from each other — and they will all need to learn Torah in the Holy Land. G-d willing the Holy Land will have teachers willing to teach them.