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Welfare Official Reports Juvenile Delinquency Problem in Israel

August 27, 1956
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Israel is “plagued” by a juvenile delinquency problem similar in many ways to the one experienced in American cities, Dr. I. Solomon Rosenberg, Israel Deputy Minister of Welfare, told the Greater New York Mizrachi Council, meeting here this weekend in conjunction with the Mizrachi national executive committee.

The great influx of immigrants in recent years, causing vast environmental changes, plus the fact that high school education is not free in Israel, are among the causes underlying juvenile delinquency in Israel, Dr. Rosenberg declared.

However, he said, delinquency develops more slowly in families with strong religious background, such as the Yemenite immigrants whose “background is among the most primitive and integration into modern Israeli society most difficult.”

Introduction of Reform Judaism in Israel, the welfare official declared, would weaker the unifying religious traditions existing among the immigrants “by accentuating a feeling of difference among them; would serve to tear them asunder and permit accentuation of social, cultural, physical and educational differences which exist.”

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