World Jewish News

Dvir Kahana with Naftali Bennett

Israel's government plans to subsidize Jewish day schools in the Diaspora

The Israeli government plans to subsidize Jewish day schools abroad which, it says, have not fulfilled their mission of strengthening Jewish identity and engagement with Israel.

The new plan was revealed on Monday during a meeting of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs Director General Dvir Kahane.

It will be run in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Center for Educational Technology, an Israeli organization that creates and distributes pedagogical material and trains teachers.

This project is the result of the idea of Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett to influence not only the Israeli educational system but also the Jewish educational system in Europe.

In first instance, assistance will be extended to Jewish day schools in Europe and South America.

Last December, the State of Israel announced its intention to strengthen the connection to Diaspora Jewry. The idea is to strengthen the ties and mutual responsibility between Israel and the Jewish people in the world, in light of the many and complex challenges common to the people in Israel and around the world.

For this project, Naftali Bennett, who is the leader of the Habayit Hayehudi party and serves as both Minister of Education and Minister of Diaspora Affairs decided to spend 136 million shekels (around 30 million euros) over the next four years.

It is the first time that Israel has engaged in such a big educational undertaking in diaspora schools.

The idea is to establish a pedagogical center for Jewish education and heritage that will provide tools, train educators, study materials and invest resources in Jewish schools around the world to "strengthen Jewish identity and the connection to Israel among students."

At the beginning there will be a a pilot project with 200 Jewish schools.

The goal of the project is to unite all the Jewish schools in the world, which usually operate alone: "The schools are committed to the local curriculum in the core areas and strive to achieve very high achievements in these fields." is written in the project description .

In the area of Jewish studies, the situation is complex: there are many challenges in developing an orderly and understandable curriculum and in recruiting and nurturing teachers for Jewish studies.

Kahane told members of the Committee that each Jewish day school that qualifies for support from the government will receive a package of services and learning materials valued at $150,000 a year for a period of five years – a total of $750,000 per school for the duration of the program.

“We have studies that show that there are dozens of Jewish day schools out there that have no significant impact on their students,” said Kahane, “so we thought about what we could do to intervene and decided to create this platform.”

Among the factors examined to determine whether the day schools offer what Kahane called a “Jewish return on investment” were rates of intermarriage among graduates, and levels of engagement with the local Jewish community in the Diaspora and with Israel.

The new Jewish day school scheme, reflects their philosophy that Israeli taxpayers should help support Jewish communities abroad now that Israel has the means and is no longer a poor country.

According to data from the Diaspora Ministry, world Jewry now numbers about 14.4 million, of which 6.3 million are in Israel and the rest are in the Diaspora.

Over 80 percent of the world's Jews who do not live in Israel have a low or nonexistent affinity for Judaism or the State of Israel. Only 25 percent of the young generation in the United States feels connected to Israel, and Judaism is only significant for 33 percent of them. This leads to a sharp decline in the number of Jews as a result of assimilation.

EJP