Petah Tikva, Israel – Two days before the opening of the school year, a compromise reached between Petah Tikvah Mayor Itzik Ohayoun and principals of the city’s schools will enable 109 students of Ethiopian origin will to enroll in religious schools.
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On Sunday, the three schools which set off a public storm with their initial refusal to enroll the students – Lamerhav, Da’at Mevinim and Darkei Noam – also agreed to accept some 30 children who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia with their parents in recent years and are required to attend religious schools as part of their conversion process.
According to the deal, all of the pupils will be accepted to regular classes throughout the city without having to take preliminary tests.
To ease the move into the normal classes, the Ministry of Education will provide each child with an enrichment program tailored to his or her personal needs.
Before the deal was reached, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday called the schools’ refusal to accept the Ethiopian students a “moral terror attack.”
Also President Shimon Peres slammed the three schools that had refused to enroll Ethiopian students.
“Is this a way to accept olim? Humiliating treatment of this kind offends and hurts all of us,” Peres, who was attending the opening of the Nofey Habsor School in the Eshkol region, said during a meeting with teenagers.
The president called on the students to do whatever they can to eliminate racial discrimination.
The story has been drawing increased attention as the school year approaches.
It intensified earlier this week when the Parent-Teacher Association in Petah Tikva threatened a strike if the principals of the schools in question continued to refuse to enroll the pupils, while the Education Ministry’s director-general, Dr. Shimshon Shoshani, threatened to pull significant funding from the schools if the pupils were not enrolled by the first day of school.
Here is what happens when you take money from Zionist government. The government wants to destroy Torah education, not help it, and the money were bait-and-switch. The schools were promised independence, including the admissions policies. Now the government have changed the rules of the game and there is a real chance of these schools going down – the better-off parents taking their children out, the Schwartzas influencing the rest etc.
To #’s 2,3,4,5:
The color of skin has very little to do with the issue. Yemenite Jews are not much lighter-skinned than the Kushim and nobody questions their Jewishness. Of course, there are some issues with admissions into Ashkenazi yeshivos, but these are manageble without Zionist interference. It will suffice to say that those subscribing to Hareidi lifestyle are being accomodated in a reasonable way, in addition to Ashkenazi support to traditional Yemenite mosdos.
However, most of Ethiopian Crypto-Jewish Schwartzas (btw, most of recent emigrees are meshumodim) have at least questionable connections to Judaism. It is amazing that non-Hareidi posters are catching onto R. Ovadia’s psak without considering that it based entirely on 450-years-old hearsay (albeit by Radbaz) against historical and genetic evidence. You don’t usaually see such respect for Radbaz from MO crowd, especially for his opinions on slavery, women’s rights etc. But at least Hareidi Ashkenazim are not meshubad to that, and definitely not to the point of view of pork-eaters Netaniyahu and Peres.
Plus, the ones who want to accept Hareidi lifestyle and to go through Giur via Hareidi beis-din are being accomodated. The others belong to Zionist educational system.