Christian schools still unable to access much-needed grant money

Conditions for accessing NIS 50 million too strict, official says; government says criteria were known in advance

Israel’s Christian schools, which are facing financial collapse, cannot get money from a government grant due to difficult conditions for accessing the funds, a school official told the Times of Israel on Monday.

On Wednesday, after months of government stalling, Israel’s Social Equality Ministry announced an NIS 50 million grant for the network of 47 schools, which are almost all Catholic and cater to some 33,000 children, many of which are Muslim.

The NIS 50 million were promised to the school network after a lengthy public struggle that included a strike at the start of the school year last September over budget cuts that officials said amounted to hundreds of millions of shekels.

The grant, however, makes the funds accessible only for “formal or informal activities” connected to “the spirit of Christian values.”

Hundreds of Arab Israeli Christians hold banners in a rally against what they said was state discrimination in funding their schools at the foot of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth on September 1, 2015 (AFP PHOTO / AHMAD GHARABLI)

Butrus Mansour, a member of the Christian school network’s secretariat, told the Times of Israel that the educational institutions needed the grant to pay teachers and other debts. Limiting the money to new activities for Christian education doesn’t solve the initial problem, creates new problems and possibly wastes funds, he argued.

For example, Mansour said his own school was supposed to receive NIS 2 million from the grant. While that may sound like a blessing, he said he could not come up with 2 million shekels worth of activities for Christian education. It would also mean adding 20 more hours to a 40-hour school week.

“We’re not a yeshiva,” Butrus said using a Hebrew word for a Jewish seminary. “We can’t add all these hours to the curriculum.”

Arab Israeli Christian schoolchildren play soccer at the Terra Sancta School in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Ramle, May 26, 2015. (AP/Oded Balilty)

In response to the complaint from Christian schools, the Social Equality Ministry said in a statement that the criteria for the grant were determined and accepted in advance after several meetings between Christian leaders, the accountant-general and representatives from the ministries of justice and education.