Religious educational institutions are threatening to leave the state education system if the Dovrat reform is implemented. An emergency conference yesterday in Jerusalem cited perceived damage to independent religious education.
Religious education system representatives announced the establishment of a committee of educators and public figures that will examine the establishment of an independent national religious education system, separate from the state education system.
The parley included former chief rabbis Avraham Shapiro and Mordechai Eliyahu, former National Religious Party ministers Effi Eitam and Zevulun Orlev, heads of the Zionist-religious education institutions and representatives of religious teachers.
The religious public's opposition to the Dovrat recommendations hinges on their revoking the Education Ministry religious education administration's independence, anchored in law since the 1950s. The Dovrat recommendations are expected to reduce the administration's powers and subject it to the education minister.
"They're going to have someone who doesn't keep the Sabbath and doesn't uphold Jewish dietary law instruct me? Tell me what to do?" Eliyahu railed at yesterday's conference.
"Someone on the commission got ambitions to correct Ben-Gurion," Orlev said.
Another controversial recommendation would subject institutions that train teachers to university supervision, which would retract yeshivas' legitimacy as teachers colleges.
Interim Dovrat recommendations state that only an academic degree in a subject would qualify teachers to instruct in the subject. "As soon as education is taken out of the hands of the rabbis, there is no education," Eliyahu said, "If they want only university-educated teachers, we will have independent education."
Another problematic recommendation from the religious public's standpoint is the closure of schools with less than 250 students, due to financial considerations. Many religious education institutions - due to gender separation and the differences between various streams of religious education, coupled with the fact that the religious public is a minority - are small. Orlev says the recommendations would close up to 50 percent of religious schools.
It also appeared that the argument between representatives of religious Zionism and Shlomo Dovrat took on a personal tone. Representatives of the religious education system described an unpleasant meeting with Dovrat after the Jewish holidays, in which Dovrat alleged "the religious education system raised hilltop youth rather than educating toward a broad and comprehensive viewpoint."
At the conference, Shapiro and others called on the religious representatives on the Dovrat committee, Rabbis Shai Peron and Avraham Gisser, to resign.
Ofra chief rabbi Gisser did not sound upset by the conference. "The commission has already decided the religious education system will keep autonomy to determine the Jewish studies curriculum and its authority to train religious teachers."
Peron claimed Dovrat's comments on hilltop youth were taken out of context.