I invite anyone who does not see the connection to continue to enjoy his blindness. Education Minister Yuli Tamir is cutting budgets and slots in national service for religious girls. According to an article in Yedioth Ahronoth, “sources in the Ministry of Education” say that Peace Now’s representative in the cabinet is bothered mainly by the fact that about 300 national service girls are teaching Judaism in secular schools.
| Tamir's Decision |
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| Jewish education group slams Tamir over budget cut / Tamar Trabelsi-Hadad |
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Education minister cuts budget of Association of Centers for the Promotion of Jewish Education that relies on national service volunteers to provide lessons in Jewish heritage, Zionism |
| Full Story |
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Perhaps this isn’t planned, but it certainly is orchestrated. One person brings in another, and one attack leads to the next. This is the atmosphere among several senior government officials and their representatives in the media, who exploit every opportunity to attack and insult the national-religious.
Kadima and the Labor Party are about to lose power, and they are attempting to harm important institutions and enterprises that the national-religious public has been building here for decades (and I’m purposely not discussing the regular attack on the settlements because this is a “controversial” and “political” topic, but this, too, has a clearly anti-religious flavor).
Sources in the Ministry of Education claim that the girls in national service are “too right wing.” Because I also have my own sources, I can reveal that sources in the secular schools are happy with the religious girls’ role in strengthening Jewish education. The secular schools are actually happy that the girls in national service explain to the students things that are not always conveyed and discussed in the schools.
Yes, the secular, other than the Minister of Education, want their children to benefit from a bit of Zionism and Judaism, and they are happy that this work is being done by religious girls doing national service. Without politics and without right-wingers and without all the nightmares of the envious Left.
A regular, average secular parent, if there is such a thing, may not be bothered that you can mention the “nakba” among the Arabs with the encouragement of the Education Minister, but he is disturbed that his secular children’s secular teachers do not teach him anything about Judaism or tradition. Secular people who are not the Minister of Education do not fear the religious.
But the militantly secular give the evil eye to religious people who are not part of the secular majority. The second and third generation of the classic Mapai, a minority that for demographic and other reasons is growing ever smaller, cannot stand the institutions of religious education: hesder yeshivot, national service, pre-army preparatory programs, the university, and of course, the settlements. All the places that lead the agenda and are raising a self-confident religious elite.
That is why, when a politician like Yuli Tamir takes up her exalted post, she does everything she can to cause harm to the right-wing religious. After all, if despite her being left-wing she has reached such an exalted position, is it conceivable that she would not take advantage of it in order to tame those religious people a bit? Is she capable of giving up the pleasure of proving to them who’s in charge?
You can argue forever about national service, about who is authorized to teach Judaism in secular schools, and about who should teach it. But that’s really changing the subject. The thing is the evil eye and the string of attacks on the national-religious enterprise. This last shot at national service is just another link in an ugly chain.
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