The suggestion that the fight over the OROT girls school building could have been simply solved by switching the girls and boys locations, so as to not have a girls school so close to a haredi neighborhood is absolutely ridiculous.
Besides for the fact that there was never such an agreement; the VAAD denies it, the city has not produced any such agreement, the Ministry of Education has said they built it for OROT girls, the mayor has been quoted by someone who spoke to him in May 2010 saying that it will be OROT girls (well after he is now claiming there was an agreement). Besides for all that, the suggestion that such an agreement would solve the problem is a red herring.
Do haredi neighborhoods not have girl schools located within? Do haredi neighborhoods send their girls to learn on the outskirts of the city? in the fields? Do they not have their own bais yaakovs? their own seminaries? their own girl schools under any other name? This applies to the entire spectrum of haredi, from the most chardal to the most extreme kannoish.
To suggest that it is a problem to have a girls school so close to a haredi neighborhood is so stupid it is almost insulting.
The issue is control. They want the building for themselves, but even more so they want to exert their control. And if the mayor thinks that such a silly agreement will solve the problem, he is giving them the control they are looking for.
As a local resident says in the JPost article: "I can’t walk in the streets here with my children because there are women in the street who are religious, but not in haredi dress."
ReplyDeleteYou're right, the issue is control. But I think you're minimizing what to these residents is a significant distinction between dati leumi girls and charedi girls.
They see dati leumi girls as a spiritual threat, to the point where they "can't walk down the street" with their children for fear of seeing them. You and I may think this is a loathsome and sad philosophy, but to them it's not "ridiculous" at all to protest a dati leumi girls school while having no problem with a beis yaakov.
Biryonim are destructive in every generation: social misfits who don't take "NO" for an answer.
ReplyDeleteThe trend of not showing women's faces in "heimishe" media bespeaks the dread of women's capabilities, intelligence and inititave. Efforts to make women invisible are symptoms of misogyny, another effort at power control.
Demand arrests, psychiatric evaluations and PERMANENT evictions from the entire city. Psychopaths do not do teshuva.
The charedi community is constantly being fed Charedi Supremecy propaganda and they have put Dati-Leumi at the top of their hate list.
ReplyDeleteMore proof that this claim is disingenuous is that when the boys' school opened 4 years ago the extremists reacted the same way; vandalism, threats, graffiti, and they put dead fish in the school over Chol Hamoed Succot.
ReplyDeleteNo, this is about control. No different, really, than dogs peeing to establish their turf.