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Equal opportunity for Conservative prayers
By Yuval Yoaz (haaretz 26.08.04)
Every morning, thousands of pupils arrive at 27 elementary schools in the Tali system (the Hebrew acronym for Tigbur Limudei Yahadut, or Enhanced Judaism Studies) and enter their classrooms, where they pray for 20 to 30 minutes. "Everything is done in accordance with the ages of the children," explains Rabbi Dr. Eitan Chikli, director-general of the education foundation of the schools in which Tali operates. "In Grade one, they begin with shorter bits, and as the children grow up and are capable of more, they learn larger portions of the prayer book."
On the Hebrew new moon, the school holds a more wide-ranging event, at which the pupils pray in unison, similar to the events that take place in the state-religious schools.
Based on Sunday's High Court of Justice ruling, these prayer sessions will now take place with funding of the Education Ministry, even though the schools that offer Tali are not part of the state-religious stream, and are identified with the Masorti (Conservative) movement. Justices Eliahu Mazza and Mishael Cheshin stated in the majority opinion, as opposed to that of Justice Ayala Proccacia, that the ministry would be compelled to grant the schools in which Tali operates a budget supplement equivalent to 0.2 weekly hours for every pupil, for daily prayers.
The court's decision affects 27 of the 52 schools in which Tali operates - those in which prayer has taken place on an everyday basis for two years - as part of the ministry-approved compulsory curriculum. A total of 20,000 pupils participate in the program, in the networks schools as well as its 50 kindergartens. The justices also ruled that the supplement the ministry is required to allocate will apply retroactively to the two previous school years. The court also ordered the ministry to pay Tali's legal expenses of NIS 15,000.
The legal battle began nearly a year ago, in the form of a petition filed by Tali against the education ministry in the wake of its refusal to grant a budget supplement for the prayer sessions. Tali, which operates a program for enhanced Jewish studies in collaboration with principals and teachers in state schools throughout the country, felt that the Shoshani Committee report, which redefined the budget allocation system for elementary schools, requires the ministry to fund hours of daily prayer in its schools.
The Ministry of Education rebuffed the claim. The Shoshani report, the state explained to the High Court of Justice, determined a uniform budget allocation system for all elementary schools, which is based on egalitarian and uniform criteria, which in so doing also abolished the numerous special allocations that have evolved over the years. Nevertheless, the report also called for "budgetary supplement for unique sectors," in the framework of which the ministry approved the granting of 0.2 hours per week to each pupil, for the purpose of prayer in the state-religious schools. The state argued that this only applied to those schools "that are obligated to provide prayer hours as part of the compulsory curriculum."
"Tali schools do not meet the criteria set by the committee," wrote attorney Dina Zilber of the State Prosecutor's Office. "They are not a unique sector and have never been declared as such." She argues that the budget supplement that is allocated for the purpose of prayer to the state-religious stream is itself an aberration, and "in order to preserve the spirit of the report, we must not add one aberration on top of another aberration, as acceptance of the Tali request would have the effect of undermining the principles of the report. There would be no end to the eroding effects of such a process."
Recognition of the Tali schools as a `sector,' claims the state, might lead to budgetary demands from other unique schools. "Recognition of Tali as an educational sector in its own right would have the effect of draining the term `sector' of meaning, due to its over-extension. Because at that point every other collection of schools that has a unique version or that has any sort of distinctive attribute will demand a supplement for prayer, even if it wouldn't actually take place.
"The education ministry's concern that ordinary secular schools would speciously represent themselves as if they pray in school doesn't hold water," charged attorney Yair Asahel of the M. Abramson law firm, which is representing Tali. "If they nevertheless submit these sort of requests, the education ministry would examine them," Asahel says, "and if a `doomsday scenario' is indeed taking place, and every child is actually praying in school, then in any case the budget devoted to this subject would be divided equitably among all."
Education ministry director-general Ronit Tirosh said that the ministry is now reviewing the verdict and will act in accordance with it. "Implementation of the Shoshani report in the elementary schools only began over the past school year," Tirosh said, "and it is only natural that modifications and adaptations will be required during this period." "We're not trying to make anyone born-again religious," says Rabbi Chikli.
"But we do believe that as a pedagogical conception, good education also includes experience and experimentation. In all of the schools, the children learn about prayer, and in some of the schools there is also an experiential aspect in which prayer itself takes place. Most of the schools chose the traditional prayer liturgy of the Rinat Israel siddur (prayer book), which can now be found in most Israeli synagogues, but there are some schools that make changes to the prayer liturgy, and we even have one school in Jerusalem that teaches Judaism in the spirit of the Reform movement."
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