NGO petitions against state funding for haredi schools

Movement for Quality Government protests subsidizing of schools that are not recognized by the state and are not under its supervision.

By DAN IZENBERG
haredi child 88 (photo credit: )
haredi child 88
(photo credit: )
The Movement for Quality Government petitioned the High Court of Justice on Wednesday to order the government to stop subsidizing haredi elementary schools that are not recognized by the state and are not under its supervision. According to the petition, filed by attorneys Eliad Shraga, Barak Calev and Daniel Kayros, the Education Ministry allocates more than NIS 170 million each year to haredi elementary schools (talmudei torah ) that are not part of the recognized Independent Education and Ma'ayan Hachinuch Hatorani haredi streams, even though there is no legal basis for the funding. The petition states that "The Ministry of Education admits that it there is no basis in the law for the transfer of NIS 170 million of public money, annually, to support talmud torah institutions. Despite that, it continues transferring the money. If Israel is based on the rule of law, this situation cannot continue. "Not only does it transfer millions of shekels of public money without a legal basis, the procedure formulated by the state for transferring these funds is nothing but a gross attempt to divest itself of its obligation to supervise the use of these vast sums of public money. Instead, it transfers the funds to a private body that has no experience or training in supervising the spending of the funds and whose interests are not identical with the public interest." The supervisory bodies referred to by the petitioners include the two non-state, recognized haredi educational streams: Independent Education, run by Agudat Yisrael and Degel Hatorah, the two parties that form United Torah Judaism; and the Ma'ayan Hachinuch Hatorani stream run by Shas. Recently, the Knesset passed a law obliging the state to allocate to yeshivot (haredi secondary schools similar in age group to state high schools) 60 percent of the funding per student that it grants state secular and state religious schools, even though the yeshivot refuse to teach the core curriculum required by law. However, the petitioners argued that the new law did not apply to primary school age children in talmudei torah that refused to teach the core curriculum. They also said that the High Court had ruled several years ago that schools that did not teach the core curriculum should not receive state funding. Even though the Knesset legislation had bypassed that decision, the court's position nevertheless strengthened their arguments against funding the talmudei torah since the recently approved law applied only to yeshivot.