Abigail is a young mother of two boys, expecting her third child. Abigail and her husband, Gil, are secular and don't want their children to have a religious education. When Nir Barkat promised he would bring a change to the city, they felt he was addressing people like them. But last week their local preschool, Beit Hayeled in Rehavia, was turned from a secular to a traditional, semi-religious one and, despite the changing of the guard at city hall, they were left feeling that their needs as secular young parents had again been sacrificed. To make matters worse, the change was decided upon without consulting the parents.

Haredi children in class (illustrative}
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

Abigail and Gil, like many Jerusalemites, are victims of changing demographics in the city. As a result of declining enrollment of secular children, the municipality's education department is closing down or changing the character of its educational institutions in order to keep them open.

While the municipality said that in Abigail and Gil's case the children had been allowed to enroll in a preschool outside of their catchment area, this leaves them having to travel up to half an hour every day, a solution the parents say is far from satisfactory.

The issue of declining enrollment in state secular education and, for that matter, in the state religious stream, is not new to Jerusalem and its residents. The situation is one of the most troubling consequences of the demographic changes experienced by the city.

Every year, the municipality finds itself facing the same ritual: a state kindergarten, preschool or an elementary school gets fewer and fewer pupils. Not far from there, in a haredi neighborhood, children study under awful conditions - quite often in warehouses or rented small apartments, without courtyards or any facilities. Facing the decline in enrollment of secular pupils, the education department has no choice but to hand the half-empty kindergarten or school over to a haredi institution.

Quite often, the closing of a secular educational institution is, in fact, the first sign that a neighborhood is becoming more religious and eventually haredi. That's the way it happened in Ramot, in Ma'alot Dafna, and now it is happening in Rehavia and Baka and Kiryat Hayovel.

"The trend has existed here for more than a decade, I would say 13 or 14 years," says Dr. Maya Chochen of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. "It started in the kindergartens, then moved on to preschools and elementary schools, and today we can see it even in some high schools."

Chochen says that in each case it is not easy to forecast which institution will be the next to meet the same fate, "but it is the municipality and its education department's duty to try to find solutions as soon as possible and not wait until the situation is irreversible. In any case, the key here is to have an open dialogue and cooperation between the education department and the parents. The days when the administration alone decided what was good for the parents and the kids are over," she says.

City councillor Rahel Azaria, who is in charge of early childhood education at Kikar Safra, sees things differently. "I heard about what happened to the Beit Hayeled preschool, and the reaction of the parents there surprised the people in charge at the education department. Nobody expected such strong opposition to the decision to hand over one out of the two classes at Beit Hayeled to the Meitarim association, which proposes a pluralistic education that focuses on Jewish values," she says.

"What can we do when young families leave the city and move to the center of the country or even to Mevaseret or other nearby locations?" says B., a preschool teacher who asked not to be identified.

"What can we do when we have only five children enrolled or even sometimes fewer? Even if the municipality could afford it financially, it is not so good for the kids themselves. The standard required by the Education Ministry is 30 pupils in a class. I guess that with 20 or even 18 kids, we could still make it work, but how can you do a decent job with five or seven children in a class? We all understand it is impossible."

Yifat Mohar is a dyed-in-the-wool secular mother of three boys. She, however, feels that the solution found by the municipality for Beit Hayeled is an acceptable one. "At least it hasn't become a religious preschool," says Mohar, "it is a new pluralistic approach, which preserves the mainstream of regular state secular education and I think that, considering the situation, it is acceptable. In similar cases in the past, we saw that complexes were turned into secular and religious kindergartens side by side. Believe me, it doesn't work. Wherever it was done in the past, the result was a lot of tension, even violence sometimes. With these two kinds of population, it just doesn't work together. But the problem is the way it was done: You don't announce such a change to the parents two days before the end of the school year, when registration is closed everywhere. That is totally unacceptable," she says.

The Beit Hayeled case is far from being the only one. So what is the municipality and, more specifically, the education department doing to solve the problem?

Azaria says that since the last elections everyone, on the professional and the political level, realizes that new approaches are urgently needed for the city's education system.

"We are working hard to find solutions," the Yerushalmim councillor says. "We have formed a team of educators, municipal educational professionals and experts from the Hebrew University to work out new and even bold solutions. We meet once a month and have hired an organizational consultant. We bring ideas, proposals, we test them, while we also work on the financial aspect of some of these proposals. The members of the team, including me, are not afraid of checking out even the most far-fetched ideas."

Yet still, even when good and successful solutions have been found, the general outcome is that there still isn't a real program to turn the capital's education system into one general, well-prepared and organized program.