MY FAMILY
THE BETA ISRAEL CURRICULUM
JEWISH EDUCATION
Teachers should now explain:
As noted, Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was by now a minority in recognizing the Beta Israel’s Jewish status. Religious leaders in Israel took it upon themselves to “normalize” members of the Beta Israel and train them in rabbinic halakha – another step toward “authenticating” their Judaism. For Beta Israel youth, this meant they had no choice but to attend state religious schools.
As Professor Fred A. Lazin explains: “In the early 1980s, Zevulun Hammer, Minister of Education in the Likud Government, and head of the National Religious Party, met with the Chief Rabbis, in light of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s earlier ruling that the Ethiopians were to be considered Jews for the purpose of immigration and education. Thereafter, he informed the Executive Committee of the Ministry that Ethiopians would attend state religious schools during their first year in Israel. They would not be allowed to exercise their legal right to choose either the state secular or religious system. While neither enacting legislation nor passing a formal resolution, the Knesset (parliament), Government and the Jewish Agency supported this policy.152
Hammer and his supporters believed that a religious education was necessary for Ethiopian Jews who had been cut off from Rabbinical Judaism for centuries. [Significantly], no similar policy was deemed necessary for the overwhelmingly assimilated Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving after 1989 who had lived in a Communist system for several generations [of whom] almost one-third were estimated to be non-Jews.”153
The decision to send the Beta Israel youth to religious schools without choice was made for other reasons too. “The religious school system adopted a policy of assimilation. It wanted the immigrants to adopt… mannerism, language, traditions, cultural mores, and values of the host society…. Successful integration meant… their abandoning ‘old ways’ and becoming models of veteran Israelis.” 154
Not every educator shared this approach: most notably the renowned educator Dr. Chaim Peri, founder of the Yemin Orde children’s village. Dr. Peri’s method, “the village way,” helped young Ethiopians become more Israeli while embracing and celebrating their Ethiopian Jewish heritage.
152 As Professor Fred A. Lazin observes, Opposition leaders within Israel’s Labor Party leaders supported this policy because they wanted to avoid the “errors” of the 1950s, when the Labor government forced observant religious Jews to send their children to secular schools.
153 Fred A. Lazin, “The absorption of Ethiopian Jews into the Israeli Education System during the Years 1984-1992,” The 10th NISPAC Annual Conference: Delivering Public Services in CEE Countries: Trends and Developments, Krakow, Poland, April 25-27, 2002 https://www.nispa.org/news/papers/wg4/Lazin-p.rtf.
154 Ibid.
