Weeks into school year, some Haredi girls still at home due to discrimination

Almost two months after the beginning of the school year, some Haredi students are still stuck at home, as the seminaries where they have been placed by local authorities refuse to admit them, an Education Ministry spokesperson told The Times of Israel on Wednesday.

For years, the Haredi community has been plagued by discrimination against Sephardic students. Critics charge that many Ashkenazi schools maintain unofficial quotas of Sephardic students stemming from racism against families of Middle Eastern origin.

Ultra-Orthodox female students usually attend high school and post-high school programs at schools known as seminaries, where enrollment can be highly competitive. Since seminaries usually teach both religious studies and the state-required curriculum (or at least part of it), they receive public funding.

In July, Channel 13 reported that some 440 Haredi girls in Jerusalem, 73 percent of them Sephardic, had not been accepted into any seminary. As a result, the municipality decided to assign students to seminaries independently and required the schools to accept them. A similar situation occurred in Bet Shemesh.

Ahead of the beginning of the school year on September 1, multiple seminaries, at the instruction of Haredi leaders, declined to allow 9th graders to begin their studies in protest of the orders issued by the two municipalities.

As of September 10, 55 Haredi students — 15 in Jerusalem and 40 in Beit Shemesh — remained without a school placement, and the Education Ministry began the process to sanction them.

Over a month later, the dispute has not been fully resolved.

Responding to a request for an update on the issue by The Times of Israel on Wednesday, the ministry said that “one seminary’s funding was revoked, and after a discussion held in recent days, the relevant students have been placed in the institution, and funding will be released.”

“The ministry is using all means at its disposal to ensure that all the placements are fully implemented, and is currently handling a limited number of students who are still waiting for their placements to be finalized,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

The ministry did not respond to multiple requests for more information, such as how many students remain without a school and in which cities.

A spokesperson for the Bet Shemesh municipality said that as of Thursday, he was aware of five or six cases of students still lacking placements in two seminars. The municipality has conveyed the information to the Education Ministry.