The family of two Ethiopian Jewish girls has sued a religious public school in the central Israeli city of Lod and the Education Ministry for discrimination after the administration demanded proof of the girls' conversion to Judaism.
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According to legal records provided Monday by Tebeka – Advocacy for Justice and Equality for Ethiopian Israelis, the family was born Jewish and is recognized as Jewish by the state without requiring conversion. Therefore, there was no conversion document to present to the school.
The lawsuit was filed last week and seeks 100,000 shekels (roughly $30,000) in damages.
The complaint states that requiring proof of conversion to register with the school "lacked authority, and was discriminatory as it was based on the premise that there is a doubt about the Jewishness of a dark skin-colored person."
The mother of the two girls approached the school in February of 2018 to register her two daughters for the next school year because she wanted them to receive a religious education.
The school is part of the Shuvu network which, according to its website, was established in the early 1990s to absorb the children of immigrants and assist them with integrating into Israeli society.
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The question of whether Ethiopians of Jewish descent must undergo some form of formal conversion procedure when arriving in Israel has long outraged the Ethiopian community, who said they were Jewish and had no need to convert. Much of that question was laid to rest in the 1990s, when then-spiritual leader of the Shas movement Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia were indeed Jews who could immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return and therefore there Jewishness should not be questioned.
Still, Ethiopian Israelis still suffer from discrimination by the religious establishment and, as all aspects of religious life in Israel are controlled by the Chief Rabbinate, many of its functionaries still require Ethiopian Israelis present proof of conversion.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
