Yadlin Says ‘melting Pot’ Concept is Not Appropriate Goal for Israel

Aharon Yadlin, Israel’s Minister of Education and Culture, rejected today the concept of the “melting pot” as an appropriate goal for the integration of Israel’s Jews coming from more than a hundred countries to settle in Israel.

He told a press conference here at the office of the National Council of Jewish Women that a synthesis of the many cultures brought to Israel by its millions of settlers was essential but said there was no parallel in Israel for the goal of racial integration for which the United States is striving.

“We do not have a racial problem,” he said. “Our problem is fundamentally one of bringing up to modern standards of knowledge and competence the children from the Oriental countries, whose families are far behind those from the Western countries.”

Yadlin came to the United States for a series of colloquia with educational experts of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University; the Teachers College of Columbia University; the Education Department and the Center for Policy Study of the University of Chicago; and the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The colloquia, which starts tomorrow at Harvard University and which will end at UCLA on April 9, were organized by the NCJW, in conjunction with the NCJW Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the School of Education at the Hebrew University. A spokesman said the purpose was to bring together researchers and policy-makers from the United States and Israel to exchange findings and to explore means by which research experts and policy-makers can work closely together.

PROBLEM OF CULTURALLY DEPRIVED PUPILS

Yadlin said that despite rocketing budgets for Israeli security, cuts in education budgets are being restricted to the universities, which he said were facing heavy reductions. But the investment in the culturally deprived school children had not been affected, though he admitted that continuing inflation was reducing the purchasing power of the allocated funds.

In discussing Israel’s educational gains for the culturally deprived, he reported that about 40 percent of all Israeli school children could be considered in that category. Of those, he said, currently 60 percent were in kindergarten, 50 percent in primary schools, 45 percent in secondary schools and 17 percent in universities. He described the 17 percent figure as a source of dissatisfaction for his Ministry.

He was critical of the relative numbers of academicians–7000–and administrative personnel–10,000–in Israel’s universities and said he would like to see the categories reversed in numbers.

The Minister was asked to what degree inadequate Jewish education, leading to a possible lack of spiritual or cultural roots, was a factor in Israel’s problem of yerida–migration from Israel. He cited, among reasons for such emigration, the continued existence of a substantial diaspora throughout Jewish history, including the present, and a lack of Zionist education. He contended that those Jews with strong Zionist convictions did not emigrate.