DID a chasidic Ashkenazi school in the town of Emmanuel, Israel bar Sephardi students? Based on some of the reporting and on the Internet banter on the question, one could come to this open-and-shut conclusion:
The discrimination in the chasidic school in Emmanuel is so pronounced that when ordered to accept Sephardi girls by the High Court of Israel (its Supreme Court), the Ashkenazi parents decided to withdraw their children, make their own school (and make it exclusively Ashkenazi) and then erect a wall between their school and the other school, which, under court order, accepts Sephardi girls.
If this were not enough, the Ashkenazi parents, defying Israels High Court, said they would and must listen to their rabbis instead.
Clearly, this segment of the Israeli population is breaking down Israeli democracy. But the government, which funds the school, has the right and duty to step in. Read related news coverage
This is the picture painted in many news reports. How much truth is there to it?
OVER the years, I have observed prejudicial attitudes among some religious Ashkenazi Jews in Israel toward Sephardi Jews there. This is destructive; it breaks down the unity of the Jewish people. The larger questions are these:
1. Is the anti-Sephardi prejudice among religious Ashkenazi Jews in Israel greater or lesser than the same prejudice among Israels secular Ashkenazi Jews? And who is combating the prejudice?
2. Did, in fact, Ashkenazi parents bar Sephardi girls from school? Are we talking about a situation analogous to the segregated schools in the American south before Brown v. Board of Education (1954)?
3. Are the parents listening to rabbis, not the court?
4. Is either the religious or the secular parties to this conflict trying to erase Sephardi culture in Israel?
5. Is Israels High Court a neutral arbiter?
I START with the last question first: Is the Israeli High Court a neutral arbiter?
One must begin by noting that Israels High Court really cant be easily compared to the US Supreme Court.
Israels highest court is created very differently from this countrys. An American Supreme Court justice represents one branch of government, but must be nominated by the president, representing the second branch of government, and confirmed by Congress, the third branch. The creation of the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy from all three branches of government.
Not so in Israel. The High Court in Israel represents only the judiciary. The High Court is literally self-selecting. The current judges choose their successors. There is no decisive executive or legislative input. As a result, the High Court is an elitist institution in a way that the Supreme Court of the US is not.
The High Court in Israel suffers the defects of in-breeding. The court is almost exclusively secular and Ashkenazi. Of 15 justices on Israels High Court, 14 are Ashkenazi. That is, less than 7% of the court is Sephardi.
The justices, no doubt, are great legal minds, and are known to be more than fair to Palestinian appellants, but on internal Israeli matters their secular, Ashkenazi prejudices or perspectives shine through in many areas. I am afraid that the current hullabaloo over the school in Emmanuel is one of them, which doesnt necessarily mean the school itself is free of problems.
We have, then, a court, which will not locate seven qualified Sephardi justices out of some six million Jews in Israel, telling a religious school that it discriminates against Sephardi religious girls. However, contrary to the news reports, the school is not exclusively Ashkenazi. Some 27% of the students are Sephardi. There is no bar against Sephardi girls in the admissions process.
The court counters that 27% represents a discriminatory percentage not a credible message coming from a self-selecting court with less than 7% of Sephardi justices.
But let us assume that 27% is, in fact, a discriminatory percentage, given the number of Sephardi applicants to the school and the total Sephardi population in Emmanuel. This means the school has a serious problem, but, to put it positively, the school is combating anti-Sephardi prejudice to an extent; the court itself, within itself, is not.
Of course, neither the court nor the school may be representative of any other institution; nonetheless, a very different picture emerges from the open-and-shut stereotype with which we began.
IF, in the admission process, Sephardi girls are not barred by the school, what is inflaming the court and the school?
Why are religious parents demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands against the ruling of the court?
There is the overt issue and the covert issue, the one addressed in the open by the court and the one at the heart of the internal conflicts in Israel today and into the future.
The overt issue is that the court maintains that the Sephardi school is discriminatory, that the 27% figure demonstrates this. The school counters that the girls, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, are accepted or rejected on the basis of religious standards, that if more Sephardi girls met the standards, more would be admitted.
The courts position smacks of hypocrisy, given its 7% Sephardi membership, but what about the schools position?
I have not personally investigated the conditions in the Emmanuel school and parent body, and cannot answer definitively. However, based on my own extensive experience in Israel, anti-Sephardi prejudice among some Ashkenazi religious Jews in Israel does exist, but alongside that, the educational and political aid extended to Sephardi Jews by Ashkenazi Jews has been extensive on both the popular and the elite levels.
Ashkenazi scholars like the late Rabbi Israel Grossman personally placed Yemenite Jews in yeshivas, while the secular Ashkenazi elite in Israel in the 1950s was intentionally stripping Yemenite Jews of their religious identity.
The leader of Sephardi Jewry in Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, was himself educated by Ashkenazi scholars at a pivotal point in his career.
Bastions of Ashkenazi Torah scholarship, such as the Hebron Yeshiva in Jerusalem, welcome Sephardi students. Some of the top graduates are Sephardi; for example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosefs grandson (also named Rabbi Ovadia Yosef), whose scholarship is a unique blend of the amazing Sephardi breadth of knowledge, exemplified by his grandfather, and of the penetrating Ashkenazi (Brisker) methodology, exem- plified by the Hebron yeshiva dean, Rabbi David Cohen. Ashkenazi-Sephardi interaction yields gems. This is the positive side of the story that is not told enough.
The late Rabbi Elazar M. Shach, head of the Ponovitch yeshiva in Bnei Brak, was a major impetus in founding the Sephardi Shas Party, whose mission is to advance the interests of Sephardi Jews.
A multifaceted advancement of Sephardi Jewry has been a major activity of religious Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, the remnants of anti-Sephardi prejudice notwithstanding.
ARE Ashkenazi religious Jews listening to their rabbis over the court? Is there a danger to Israeli democracy?
The answer is clearly yes, and here we reach the covert and critical issue: When a society is riven by deep conflict over ultimate authority, what is the best way for each side to proceed?
Israels High Court seems tone-deaf to the question. It assumes that because it currently has the power of the state, its rulings will forever trump all other authorities.
This is dangerous sociology.
Israel is very much still a society in the making. Ultimate authority between Jews (just like between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs) is not a settled issue.
The religious segment of Israel is by far its largest growth segment. If there is no meeting of the minds between secular (judicial) and religious (rabbinic) authorities, it becomes a matter of time before the secular court system will find itself unable to enforce at least some of its rulings in most of the religious segment, whether haredi or settler-oriented. The religious will either follow their own beth dins or take over the secular court system.
To sustain its authority, the High Court must tread wisely in religious-secular conflicts by, for example, reforming itself:
First: The High Court must do away with its self-selection of justices, opening itself up to an independent, broad-based and binding confirmation process, including the Knesset, where all interests of Israeli society are represented.
Second: The court must come to look like Israel both Ashkenazi and Sephardi.
Third: The court must avoid extra-legal rulings that really amount to cultural preferences. The covert issue at the heart of the school battle in Emmanuel is this: The Sephardi girls who were rejected by the Ashkenazi school come from homes with TV and Internet. This leads to different behavior from that in homes without TV and Internet.
What the High Court was really trying to do was to suppress haredi cultural difference, which, in essence, is not a difference between Sephardi and Ashkenazi but between modern and pre-modern Jewish culture. This is not a courts job.
The court will retain its authority longer and more extensively if it limits its reach to truly legal issues.
At the same time, if it is true that the Emmanuel school requires its Sephardi students to pray in the Ashkenazi pronunciation, this is a cultural erasure of its own, and is as inappropriate as the courts covert agenda.
WHAT is the best way for the religious haredi side to ?proceed?
If it can find a way for those of its young men who are not cut out for long-term Torah study to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, the questions over ultimate authority and cultural-religious difference will recede. It is hardly a secret that some haredi Torah students are wasting their time.
Just as the High Court would help itself by sticking to legal issues and leave the larger, non-legal cultural questions aside, the burgeoning haredi society would help itself by advancing the cause of the Nachal Haredi, the fervently Orthodox units in the IDF, without abandoning its legitimate, nay, its indispensable position that full-time Torah study protects Israel the same as armaments.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
