Parents of grade-school children in the Shapira neighborhood and in the Kiryat Shalom neighborhood in south Tel Aviv decided to go on strike and keep their children home from school next week in protest over a government plan viewed as geared toward children of African asylum-seekers.
The bulk of migrants from Africa who have entered Israel illegally in recent years have settled in south Tel Aviv, prompting protests from local residents who claim that the migrants have pushed crime rates up and made the neighborhoods poorer and unsafe.
According to the parents, the Tel Aviv municipality recently decided to build a new elementary school in the area, which they believe will mainly cater to children of migrants from Eritrea and Sudan. Their concern is that the new school will affect the existing schools and strip them of their current Jewish character.
Yisrael Vered, 34, a father to children in the second and fifth grades at the Shapira neighborhood school Shorashim, told Israel Hayom that "over the last two weeks, we found out that the municipality is planning to build a new elementary school in our neighborhood, and registration begins in 10 days. Why is it so urgent to open a new school in the neighborhood? Numerically, there is no justification for it, in terms of the number of children in the neighborhood."
Vered, whose family was among the founders of the neighborhood some 75 years ago, added that "our concern is that this is going to be a school for illegal infiltrators. We know that just in 2017, the birthrate [among migrants] here was 1,700 Eritrean and Sudanese babies. If you calculate [six years forward] to 2023, you can deduce that this school is actually being built for them. It will become a school for refugees – where does that put our children?"
The key issue for Vered and his fellow parents is the loss of the current character of the existing schools. The Shorashim school is a national-religious school. According to them, the new school that is slated to be built will be a secular school, and the curriculum will be accordingly secular. They allege that their children will have to adhere to adhere to the new curriculum and simply accept the change. "The municipality decided to build a secular school rather than a national-religious school so that they could enroll the infiltrators there," they warned.
The head of the parents association at the Nofim school, Aviad Issachar, 44, a father of three, told Israel Hayom that "a new group has emerged in the neighborhood, and it is our polar opposite. They are parents with radical, revolutionary views who believe in education founded on a general sense of being deprived. It is obvious to us that the new school that will be built will adopt an activist education style instead of educating children to be equal citizens."
"The municipality is experimenting with our children under political pressure. We are launching a strike in the schools and we will not stop because we are justified," he said.
On Sunday, the Nofim school will be shut down for two hours. On Monday, the Shorashim school will strike for two hours. On Wednesday, the parents plan to close both schools for an entire day.
The parents from both schools stressed that "we will strike until smoke comes out of the municipality's ears and they are forced to change their decision."
The Tel Aviv Municipality declined to address the African migrants issue, saying in a statement that "the municipality has no intention of changing the character of the national-religious schools in the Shapira and Kiryat Shalom neighborhoods. It plans to build a new secular school alongside the existing schools to cater to 60 children who live in these neighborhoods and are secular."
