Embracing segregation: The rise of a religious educational system in Israel (Shas)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the emergence of a new religious-ethnic cducational stream in Israel, Maayan Hachinuch Hatorani, ("The Wellspring of Torah Education"). It was founded in 1984 and is controlled by the 1eadership of Shas, a movement of religious renewal and Sephardic-Oriental identity. Discriminatory policies, implemented by the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi establishment, brought the leaders ofthe Shas movement to inítiate a new system capable of responding to the hardshipof a marginalized population. Shas schools, functioningwithin and being supported by the Ministry of Education, also became socializing agents for children and parents that were far from religious lifestyle. Thus, through the creation of strategies for the transmission of knowledge and behavior, the new stream challenges the secular national project, and contributes to the formatíon of a new cultural sphere.In this paper we explore how a religious movement embraces education to foster ~ocial mobilization and group solidarity. The research is an ethnographic study that was conducted between 2000-2005 in three cities in Israel. By transforming cultural boundaries and institutionalizing norms that contradict in sorne respects the principies underlying the relationship between govemment and mass schooling, Shas's education systcms contributes to forge an Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Judaism based on an ethnic type of primordial identity. The case contributes to understand the challenges that religion holds to modem systems of education and to analyze new developments in Judaism.