A prominent Israeli educator said today that his nation has waged “only an initial-skirmish” in narrowing the educational gap between its citizens of European and Oriental origins. Dr. Chaim Adler, addressing 1000 delegates at the biennial convention of the National Council of Jewish Women, specifically referred to the division that exists between Jews of Asian and African background and those whose origin is European. Dr. Adler, the director of the NCJW Center of Research in Education of the Disadvantaged in Israel, emphasized that the Council center “may be crucial to the success of the battle.” He spoke of the relevance of education to social justice and greater equality.
Dr. Adler said that the tremendous immigration from Afro-Asian countries during the first 15 years of Israel’s independence brought great numbers from the underdeveloped Moslem Middle East. The cultural gap between this group and earlier Israeli settlers posed a threat to the solidarity of the society, and socioeconomic equality of the country, he said.
Dr. Adler pointed out that “In Israel as in the United States integrated education is a political and ideological concern. The expectation, in short, is that disadvantaged students will have greater academic success if they attend integrated rather than segregated schools.” He told the delegates that the Center is now engaged in testing these assumptions in a pilot integrated school. Results show “that the disadvantaged students in the project achieved better than similar students in other schools; that middle class students in the project also achieved better, leaping forward, as a matter of fact, even more rapidly than did the disadvantaged students,” Dr. Adler said.
The danger of Arab terrorist attacks in West Germany has increased, with particularly endangered targets including Israeli installations, airline offices, the Jordanian Embassy and oil concerns. West German security services reported today. The services reported they had received numerous alerts recently from Western intelligence agencies, according to which Black September commandos are at present in Western Europe trying to gain entry into West Germany.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
