Do Sephardi children from poor neighborhoods receive an inferior education compared to their middle- and upper-class Ashkenazi counterparts?
As the government and Sephardi activists continue to debate this decades-old question, a group of teachers and parents has assembled to open two schools for underprivileged Sephardi teenagers.
The brainchild of Kedma, the Israel Association for Equal Education, the two junior high schools began operating in poor Jerusalem and Tel Aviv neighborhoods in early September.
The grass-roots organization, partially funded by the Ministry of Education, was created in 1992 by a group of mostly Sephardi intellectuals and educators who hoped to provide enriched educational programs to the kids who need it most.
Clara Yonah, principal of the new Kedma intermediate school in the Gilo section of Jerusalem, believes such measures are needed because poor children in Israel, and Sephardim particularly, “have traditionally received short shrift from the education system.”
For decades, she said, “educators have assumed that most children from lower-class neighborhoods were unsuited for an academic education, and were therefore placed in vocational high schools.
“There was the assumption — a completely false assumption — that children from large Sephardi families did not receive encouragement and attention at home, due to both social and cultural reasons, and that they were a lost cause before they even entered school,” she said.
Though she agrees that many Sephardi children now receive a good education, due in large part to the higher standard of living among many Sephardim, Yonah contends that “Israeli secondary education remains elitist.”
PROBLEMS FOR THOSE ‘SHIPPED’ TO BETTER SCHOOL
To prove her point, Yonah said that only 20 percent of working-class Mizrachi (Sephardi) and 12 percent of Israeli Arab high school students now finish high school with a full bagrut, or matriculation certificate, which is a prerequisite for all college study and most skilled jobs here.
Yonah, one of five children from a poor Sephardi family, said those underprivileged children who do excel in school are routinely “shipped out” of their neighborhoods and sent to academic high schools in more affluent neighborhoods.
Yonah, now in her 40s, recalls her own experience as a gifted child growing up in Patt, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
“I was an excellent student, at the top of my class in junior high school, and I was given the opportunity to go to a good high school outside the neighborhood,” she said. “From the first day at my new school, I found myself way behind the other students, due to the inferior education I had received earlier.”
She recalls feeling culture shock, as well as shame for her poor performance in school.
“It was the first time I came face to face with Ashkenazi society, and it came as a big shock to realize that there were two Israels,” she said. “One Israel had what it needed, the other didn’t,” she said.
If the teachers and parents associated with Kedma have their way, Sephardi children from poor neighborhoods will no longer feel inferior.
Both of the new schools, which serve 12- to 15-year-olds in their own communities, were designed to instill a sense of ethnic pride in the teens as well as provide a top-notch education, officials with the schools said.
Determined to help the kids catch up with their peers in other, better schools, Kedma decided to limit each class to 25 kids. The national average is about 40 per classroom. And, in order to provide more individualized instruction, the organization is providing two full-time teachers in the subjects of Hebrew, math and English.
While most schools end at 12:30 or 1 p.m., Kedma’s schools provide lunch — paid for by parents, municipality and the Education Ministry — followed by an afternoon enrichment program and homework sessions led by Kedma teachers.
The teachers, who had to complete a special six-month training program as a prerequisite, say commitment doesn’t stop when the teens go home.
Ezra Avnaim, an enthusiastic young art teacher at the Jerusalem school, said the program is a “totally encompassing experience, for the teachers, students and parents.”
ATTENTION GIVEN TO AN EASTERN PERSPECTIVE
Prior to the school’s opening earlier this month, Avnaim and the other teachers conducted home visits. “Now that school has started, I talk to the child, and if necessary to the parents, to learn if the child is having problems in a certain subject, for example,” he said.
Another thing that makes Kedma schools unique is the attention given to Eastern subjects.
“In a regular school,” Avnaim said, “I would be teaching art from a European perspective. Here, instead of being Eurocentric, I started the year with a study of art in India and China.”
The reason is simple, he said. “I looked at the population of the class and found that all but a handful of students’ families hail from the Middle East. In order not to favor one group over another, I chose countries that are exotic and unfamiliar to everyone. “The history teacher is doing the same thing, so the learning is multidisciplinary,” he added.
Kedma’s perspective has already led to some interesting questions, according to Avnaim. “Did you ever wonder how the Jews of the Middle East were affected by the Holocaust? Israeli schools approach the subject from a European perspective, forgetting that all Jews were affected, one way or another.”
Yonah, the school’s principal, said that such an approach “gives the kids pride in their backgrounds and heritage.”
Nechama Shriki, mother of 12-year-old Gili, agrees. “I like the Mizrachi emphasis, and the fact that the classes are so small,” said Shriki, whose family lives in Patt.
Shriki said Gili has always floundered in school. And of her two older children, “one is getting out of the army and struggling to pass his bagrut, and the other never did bagrut and is a mechanic. Given the opportunity, both would have done the exam before entering the army.”
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.
