JERUSALEM, 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.
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.
Briefly after word of the compromise was let out, however, Petah Tikva’s parent council announced that it rejected the deal, as only 30 of the pupils will be integrated in the city’s private schools, and reiterated its threat for a strike on September 1.
“The compromise offers no true equality, neither in the numbers nor in the way the pupils are to be integrated,” said chairman of the council Gadi Yaffe. The council called for an emergency meeting with Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar.
Before the deal was reached, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday called the schools’ refusal to accept the Ethiopian students a “moral terror attack.”
In a joint interview with Army Radio and Israel Radio, on a special day of broadcasts dedicated to battling violence, Netanyahu said that schools that refuse to enroll Ethiopians will be punished, and vowed there would be no racial discrimination against Ethiopians in Israel.
Also on Sunday, 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.
On Wednesday principals of the three schools, along with representatives from the Petah Tikva Municipality and the Education Ministry, held a meeting over the matter.
At the meeting, the ministry official delivered letters containing the names of pupils the principal’s were expected to enroll.
A source speaking on behalf of the schools told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that during the meeting the principals had inquired as to their requests that the students should be on a par as regards Hebrew and basic math skills and should match the schools’ ministry-approved requirements for aptitude, behavior and religious practice.
When told that the pupils did not match the said requirements, the principals again expressed their reservations about enrolling them and, according to the source, were then asked by the Education Ministry official to attend a meeting with Shoshani on Thursday.
(THE JERUSALEM POST, Abe Selig and Ron Friedman contributed to this report.)