Prominent Haredi school to operate separate program for Sephardi girls – report

A prominent Haredi girls’ seminary in Jerusalem will reportedly operate a separate institution for Sephardi students, which will have a distinct entrance from that of their Ashkenazi peers.

Beit Yaakov Darchei Rachel, a high school and post-high school educational institution for ultra-Orthodox young women, was required by the municipality to accept students of Sephardic origin, but its director, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Mendelsohn, decided to establish a segregated program instead of integrating them with Ashkenazi students, Channel 13 news reported on Monday.

The municipality usually announces students’ placements for the following academic year by the beginning of June, but some 440 Haredi girls were not accepted into any seminary.

According to data presented by Channel 13, 73 percent of those girls are Sephardi, while only 22% of seminary students in Jerusalem overall are Sephardi.

As a result, the municipality decided to assign students to seminaries independently and required the schools to accept them.

However, according to Hebrew media reports, prominent Ashkenazi rabbis, among them the leader of Lithuanian Judaism, Rabbi Dov Lando, held an emergency meeting about the issue last month and instructed the school principals to refuse to cooperate with the initiative.

A spokesperson for the Jerusalem Municipality told The Times of Israel via email on Tuesday that the municipality is not aware of the segregated program at the Beit Yaakov Darchei Rachel seminary. The spokesperson added that all the students who had not been accepted to a seminary have since been placed.

Discrimination against Sephardi students has plagued the Haredi community for years.

Critics charge that many Ashkenazi schools maintain non-official quotas of Sephardi students, stemming from racism against families of Middle Eastern origin.

In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled against an ultra-Orthodox school in the Immanuel settlement in the West Bank, instructing it to end all discriminatory practices against Sephardi girls.

Yet, over the years, incidents of discrimination and refusals to admit Sephardi students have regularly resurfaced.

The Jerusalem Municipality told Channel 13 that “the responsibility for students’ placement is under the supervision of the Education Ministry.”

The ministry meanwhile stated that “discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is fundamentally wrong,” and that the claims would be investigated, but that it had not received any direct complaint from parents for the upcoming school year.

Following the Channel 13 exposé, several opposition MKs requested that the Knesset Education Committee organize a special session devoted to the topic, summoning the Jerusalem Municipality and requiring it to share all relevant information.

Labor MK Naama Lazimi wrote on X on Tuesday that the meeting will take place on July 21.