How to Solve the Haredi Education Controversy

In the ever-tangled world of Israeli politics, it’s easy for one crisis or scandal to blend into the next. So you may not have noticed that a few weeks ago the two ḥaredi parties, the ḥasidic Agudas Yisroel and the non-ḥasidic Degel haTorah, almost ended a 30-year electoral alliance in which they run jointly for election under the banner of United Torah Judaism. In the end, they stuck together, but the cause of the dispute that nearly led to their divorce is worth examining in detail, since it might have major implications for the future of the ḥaredi community, and, by virtue of that, the Jewish people as a whole.

The furor erupted following the announcement of a formal offer made by the Ministry of Education that would allow all private ḥaredi schools to access government funding without the current requirement that each school be registered with one of several larger recognized school networks—so long as each school’s students achieve national standards in the core subjects of mathematics, English, and Hebrew. The offer, which remains open, is informally known as the “Belz proposal,” after the second-largest ḥasidic sect in Israel, Belz, whose representatives spent two years secretly negotiating the deal. The proposal, if implemented, would herald the dawn of a new era in which one of the largest and most mainstream ḥasidic sects would provide a national standard of secular education to ḥasidic boys all the way through to graduation.

Belz’s motivation was solving a long-term funding deficit in their ever-expanding network of private schools for young members of their rapidly growing sect. Belz first attempted to join an existing ḥaredi school network known as Ḥinukh Atzma’i (literally, Independent Education), whose members receive partial government funding in exchange for partial compliance with the state’s curriculum. After these attempts failed, Belz decided to negotiate its own deal. Instead of the traditional approach—scheduling a mere few hours of sloppily delivered secular subjects in return for cash, with no effective oversight of quality—Belz would receive full funding on the condition that the students, upon graduation, achieve national standards in external examinations.