VIDEO - Haredi education officials were in for an unpleasant surprise this week. Education Minister Yuli Tamir, whom they had always considered to be one of their best friends, informed the Education Committee that she has no intention of funding long school days for private kindergartens. Her edict affects both haredi and Arab classes, which are funded by private associations and are not part of the public educational system.
The Yated Neeman journal reflected the seething haredi public’s dismay. “Education Minister declares war on haredi education,” the headlines blared.
“Just because the father chose a certain type of education, the child shouldn’t receive? That’s why an innocent child who doesn’t know anything has to suffer? If the Education Minister would come and say to us: ‘You – you don’t have total budgeting…’ But to boycott us? We live in a state that still boycotts us? How did we get here? We have many children and educational institutions in the north, who suffered exactly like the rest of the Nation of Israel. So why are they being sentenced like the Arabs?” Rabbi Yitzchak Goldknopf, a senior haredi educational administrator who closely followed the proceedings at the Knesset, wonders.
Nevertheless, Goldknopf remains hopeful that the decree will not come to pass. “I’m sure that the Shas party won’t stay in the coalition, when their children are being boycotted,” he asserts.
In addition, Goldknopf counts on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “who spent ten long years together with me in the educational systems in Jerusalem. At that time, he declared that the ruling for one child is the same as the ruling for another child and that there is no discrimination in education between blood and blood. I trust that he will get up and pick up the gauntlet.”
Goldknopf would also like to believe that what occurred in the Education Committee “was perhaps a mistake, when the Minister said that she won’t provide a long school day for haredi students. It’s possible that she herself will say ‘I was mistaken.’ It will save her a lot of aggravation.”
Haredi MK’s reacted furiously to Tamir’s declaration, and Shas committee members warned that the decision could have coalitional implications. Consequently, Education Ministry staffers met with haredi representatives, and the possibility of integrating the haredi kindergartens within independent educational networks, such as Chinuch Atzmai and Maayan HaChinuch HaTorani, which are legally equivalent to public educational institutions, was raised.
The battle in Beitar Illit
Haredim are very sensitive about their children’s education. Haredi teachers, principals, and politicians repeatedly claim that the haredi educational system suffers from massive budgetary cutbacks and that the problem’s root cause is Israeli society’s attitude towards the haredi public.
A relatively recent, blatant example of the phenomenon is the Nutrition Law. In May 2004, a related pilot project was set to include twenty-two thousand students countrywide, including five thousand students from the haredi city of Beitar Illit. Eventually, however, the Education Ministry decided not to include students from haredi institutions, and, as a result, the Beitar Illit municipality petitioned the High Court of Justice. Justice Mishael Cheshin postponed the hearing, thus further enraging the haredim.
According to Yisrael Tik, director of Beitar Illit’s educational department, the court’s ruling only enforced haredim’s perception of injustice.
“Justice Cheshin said that whoever wants the Torah must also bring the flour,” he notes almost bitterly. “And this is the attitude that causes us to feel discriminated against. We think that the Torah is a foundation stone for the Nation of Israel, a foundation stone for the State of Israel, and the Torah is not for whoever wants it. The Torah is the heritage of the entire Jewish nation, and the Jewish nation, during thousands of years of exile, fought for this Torah. And in the place where we dance with it and embrace it, we’re told: ‘Whoever wants the Torah – should also bring the flour.’ Later, when the law was introduced, it was drafted such that there was no way that the haredi public could participate.”
Last Thursday, a notice appeared in the haredi Hamodia newspaper. “As a first step towards repairing the neglect of the haredi public, the Education Minister will establish an expert committee to include the haredi educational institutions in the nutrition program,” ran the text, which MK Yaakov Litzman, chairman of the Finance Committee, had received from Raanan Dinur, director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office. Hamodia’s editors published an exact copy of the letter.
'We feel discriminated against'
Some statistics: There are 289,380 students in the haredi educational system. 52,998 pupils attend so-called “recognized but unofficial” institutions, which implement a portion of the core curriculum and therefore receive 75 percent of potential funding. 43,318 children study in “exempt” institutions, which are more pedagogically independent and receive only 55 percent of potential funding. 172,949 haredi students are enrolled in kindergartens, special education, and Shas’s Maayan HaChinuch HaTorani and United Torah Judaism’s Chinuch Atzmai educational networks.
Thus, the haredi institutions’ pedagogical independence and right to choose their own curricula comes at a price. In effect, these schools lose between 25 to 45 percent of their potential budgetary funding. Of course, this cutback is self-imposed, but haredi educational officials insist that they basically have no choice.
Yehuda Kornblitz, an educational supervisor at Tiferet Moshe, a haredi-hassidic institution in Beitar Illit, observes that haredi education suffers from discrimination which is “tacitly accepted, but it doesn’t exactly stem from our side, but from the other side. Maybe there it’s accepted that we’ll teach how we want to teach, and they’ll give us accordingly. But that’s not what we agreed to; rather, it’s what they agreed to give us.”
Shimon Halperin, the administrative principal at the same school, remarks that he does not know “why there is discrimination, but this feeling is clear. Reality shows that our children are educated very differently from on the street. Our children are educated in a manner that elicits respect from anyone who sees them. Here and there, there are marginal cases, but in 99 percent of our public, there are no robbers, no murderers, and all the plagues of the street. And specifically these children, who are watched over to ensure that they won’t receive what happens on the street, receive less funding. I think that this provides some sort of index as to the direction, the level and the objective.”
Nonetheless, many haredim imply that despite the discrimination, they believe that their educational system is actually worthy of emulation. Tik stresses that in recent years, “The general public has begun to understand that the haredi educational system is not an embarrassment for Israel, but in fact the opposite. It is a source of pride. Even if in the past, they would insinuate that haredi children are not educated, we then proved ourselves with standardized national achievement tests.”
Rabbi Yitzchak Eisen, Tiferet Moshe’s educational principal, adds that it never occurs that “because of some problem or another, the school year doesn’t start. There are no strikes; we don’t have that concept. There are almost no vacations, based on the idea that one must learn Torah, based on awareness that a child needs a framework, and we know very well what happens during vacation periods.”
A special supplement for the month of Elul includes an article by Rabbi Binyamin Szaransky, principal of the Beit Yaakov HaYashan seminary in Jerusalem. In the piece, Rabbi Szaransky criticizes Western secular education and writes that “Western educational culture views man as a creature who is limited to several decades of life and whose objective it is to use these years for pleasure and immediate gratification.
”Hence,” he explains, “the education that he receives is a Chinese-American education, which is suited for disposable products, which have no purpose to their existence except for seeking immediate and temporary pleasures and choices.
“In contrast,” Rabbi Szaransky continues, “haredi education is built and based on the knowledge that man is an eternal creature. The framework of his life in the present is meant to prepare him for eternal life, when he will find himself in an unending process of ascension and growth.”
In a conversation with Ynet, Rabbi Szaransky states that he believes “that public education has lost every objective. It doesn’t know what it wants. It wants to imitate America or China. I pray and truly request that public education will have a great future, but then there has to be a change in thinking.”
According to him, public education must first ask itself “if there are valued teachers, and what are values. There is an educational crisis in the state. A person who is sick consults with the best professors. He searches for the disease’s causes and attempts to cure it. It is sufficient to open a newspaper in order to understand that there is a crisis.”