Israeli rabbis are exhorting parents not to send their children to non-Orthodox religious schools or to State-run religious schools that are co-educational. They also object to schools where Jewish and Arab pupils might meet.
The two Chief Rabbis — Avraham Shapiro (Ashkenazic) and Mordechai Eliahu (Sephardic) — distributed a statement in the Ramot, French Hill and other Jerusalem neighborhoods exhorting parents against enrolling their children in the Masorati (traditional) schools officially known as “Tali,” a Hebrew acronym for “enhanced Jewish studies.”
These schools, though not formally linked with the Conservative movements in Israel, offer more intense Jewish studies than secular State schools without the Orthodox approach of the State religious schools.
But for another group of seven Orthodox rabbis, even the State religious schools are off limits because boys and girls are taught together and meetings have been planned between Jewish and Arab youngsters. This group, which includes Ashkenazic and Sephardic rabbis who head yeshivas, issued a statement demanding that the authorities in charge of mixed schools “transform them into separate schools for boys and girls.”
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