Ashkenazi Haredi leaders, Jerusalem reach deal on school placement of Sephardic students

Ashkenazi Haredi leaders and the Jerusalem Municipality reach an agreement on the placement of Sephardic girls in high schools and post-high school programs run by Ashkenazi institutions, after many of them delayed the opening of the school year over the issue.

“After many efforts, we succeeded in finding a solution that will allow the school year to open in the seminaries,” Mayor Moshe Lion says in a statement. “As part of the solution, two new classes will be opened to accommodate all the girls who, until now, had no placement. I want to thank all those who helped lead this solution.”

On the instructions of community rabbis, multiple seminaries in Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem declined to allow ninth graders to begin their studies Monday in order to protest instructions by the two cities’ municipalities to accept students of Middle Eastern and North African heritage who had not been accepted elsewhere.

Discrimination against Sephardic students has plagued the Haredi community for years, and critics charge that many Ashkenazi schools maintain unofficial quotas of Sephardic students due to racism against families of Middle Eastern origin.

Earlier this week, Channel 13 news reported that Rabbi Dov Lando, one of the most prominent rabbinic leaders of the so-called Lithuanian stream of Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodoxy and the spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah faction, was behind instructions to local rabbis not to accept the girls.

According to a statement by Lando’s office, the rabbi directed the “Old Seminary” — a prestigious Beit Yaakov teacher training program — and the other seminaries to open the school year after the agreement reached with the mayor.

“The cries of the students cannot be ignored,” Lando told the seminary’s director, Rabbi Yisrael Levin, according to the statement.

Asked if all the students in the new classes are of Sephardic origin, a spokesperson for the municipality says that is not the case.

“The Jerusalem Municipality, under my leadership, will not allow any form of discrimination — not on racial grounds nor on any other basis,” Lion says in the statement.

According to the Haredi news outlet Kikar HaShabbat, work on a solution is currently underway for the seminaries in Beit Shemesh, where efforts are being made to establish a new seminary for the students who did not receive a placement.