While I do not yet have the experience to comment on the education system, all ID card carrying citizens should have the right to protest.
By NECHAMA VEEDERChildren on first day of school 521(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
After I made aliya about 14 years ago, one of my first encounters with Israeli bureaucracy was the mandatory trip to what was then Jerusalem’s only branch of the Interior Ministry to apply for my identity card.“Go early and write your name down before the office opens so as to get a good place in the queue,” was the advice I was given by slightly more veteran immigrants.Heeding this warning, I nonetheless waited in line for several hours. When my turn finally arrived, I was quickly shown the door, dejected, having been informed that the documents I had used to establish my Jewishness before making aliya were sufficient for that purpose but not for qualifying for an ID card.It was the first of many unhappy encounters with Israeli officialdom.When I finally scraped together the courage to return several months later, all documents present and correct, the clerk negotiated her complex filing system to find my original application. Lo and behold, there it was, lovingly preserved by the most cutting-edge technology the government had at its fingertips, lying on a chair in the corner of the room.Undoubtedly, bureaucracy has improved since then, with some services and information readily available over the Internet. (There’s even a handy Nefesh B’Nefesh website complete with all the information you need to make the aliya process smoother.) And nobody likes a new immigrant who comes here of his own free will but can’t stop moaning about how much easier/cheaper/more civilized his life would be if he’d never boarded that one-way El Al flight.But this past summer a curious thing has happened.After years of stoically enduring high taxes, Israelis have suddenly begun to protest against everything from low wages to exorbitant dairy products and gas.And from bemoaning expensive goods, it is just a short path to decrying poor government services.So my current tale of woe is recounted not as a new immigrant but as an Israeli.THESE PAST few weeks should have been a time of joy; a celebration of new beginnings as my daughter approached the beginning of first grade.But instead of preparing her mentally, emotionally and physically for the school year, we have been strangely silent and inactive. Not knowing what school she would be attending until we finally received an answer three days before school started, there was nothing to discuss, no school shirts to buy, no books to order, no after-school program to sign up for.This year, in its wisdom, the Modi’in Municipality changed the zoning so that my address now belonged to a school 25 minutes’ walk away instead of the one eight minutes’ walk away that our neighbors’ children had been placed in until now. So three times we appealed this decision, and now it seems that three times we have been unsuccessful.That our appeal was eventually rejected I can live with, but with the way I was treated by my own municipality, as a property tax, VAT, income tax and import tax-paying citizen, I cannot.The third time I lodged my appeal, more than a month ago (July 19, but who’s counting?) I asked the clerk how I would find out the answer and was told she would call me.Reader, I believed her.Despite my misplaced faith in the system – and eager to buy the aforementioned books and school shirts – I made a few preemptive phone calls to find out if a decision had been made.After endless phone calls by the concerned parents during which much hold music was listened to and phone numbers were asked for and supplied, no calls were returned and no answer was provided.Finally, last week, less than two weeks before the first day of school, I decided to step up the struggle. OK, so being on vacation at the time, all I could do was to ensure that the person in charge actually spoke to me on the phone, but I was determined to do at least that.The joke was on me. The education department of the Modi’in Municipality – a city that prides itself on its education system – only answers the phone for three hours a day. And during that time it is apparently possible, according to the automated voice assuring callers that their calls are important to the municipality, to be the first person in the phone queue for two and a half hours (Sunday) and one and a half hours (Monday) before the call is finally answered. And that only when I gave up on the elementary- school extension and dialed the extension of the head of the department’s secretary.Anyway, the person in charge of school placements – let’s call her Rikki – informed me that there was no answer yet but there would almost certainly be one by the end of the week.
On Thursday, Sunday and Monday mornings, however, when my husband skipped the phone queue and went down to city hall, there was still no answer.And on Monday afternoon, after a total of only 45 minutes waiting on the phone line, I was given a negative answer to our appeal. The call that should have been initiated by the municipality informing me of its answer, as well as the numerous call-backs promised by Rikki’s colleagues, is still proving elusive.The Modi’in Municipality response was that since the city is still undergoing development there are demographic changes in the population, leading to new realities every year. As I am not a resident of the catchment area for the school to which I wanted to send my daughter, I cannot send her there, according to the municipality.With reference to the unanswered telephone calls, since more than 30 percent of the residents are schoolchildren there is great pressure on the education authorities at this time of year. The education department is aware of this and has consequently opened an Internet registration unit to deal with appeals on school placements.Veteran parents of school-aged children will say they have heard stories like this 100 times, or may even have had similar experiences. They will complain about the price of schoolbooks, unfair fees demanded by “public” schools for extra activities and trips, teachers’ apathy and inadequate facilities.And then they will move on to the next topic of conversation.While I do not yet have the experience to comment on the education system, all ID card-carrying citizens should have the right to protest against inadequate or inefficient government services.The problem is that, unlike cottage cheese, gas and doctors’ wages, there is little the average citizen can do to demand that the services we pay for so dearly are provided at an acceptable level.We can’t boycott them, drive in a slow convoy behind them or strike against them.I would welcome any suggestions readers have as to how to help combat bureacratic indifference. We all suffer from it.nechamav@jpost.com
