Shas helps school applicants as long as they segregate

Racism is a problem in every community and every society. No one person or movement is responsible, today, for continued racism. It is inherent within us, some more, some less, and it is on us to uproot and weed out and learn to be better.

That being said, I do believe that political parties like Shas perpetuate racism rather than try to put an end to it. A party like Shas can only continue to exist as long as their is blatant racism against Sefardim - once our society would be mostly not racist against Sefardim, Shas would have no more reason to exist. They need the racism in order to survive.

Yesterday the head of Shas's municipal party in Jerusalem said something interesting. It seems that Shas as a party has decided to no longer help Sefardi young women find places in Ashkenazi seminaries. They will only assist getting these young women into Sefardi seminaries.

When Chaim Cohen, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem from the Shas party, was asked yesterday about discrimination of Sefardi girls trying to get into seminaries, Cohen said "It does not interest me any longer. We have succeeded in getting to a place where we have seminaries some of which are at a very high level even better than those of the existing ones. Until now it hurt me when I heard girls werent being accepted, but today there are other options no less quality than those. If there is discrimination in some places, that is a defect of those places and not a problem I need to solve....Today a student who wants to go to an excellent educational framework - has a Sefardi seminary available... we are here to assist in getting girls into our own systems, seminaries have been established..."

It is great that more seminaries, of all types are opening up, offering more options to the young women looking for places to study. That being said, having Ashkenazi seminaries and Sefardi seminaries, with Sefardi girls being directed to the Sefardi seminaries and Ashkenazi girls to the Ashkenazi seminaries, is basically de facto segregation which is based on racism. There should not be Ashkenazi schools and Sefardi schools. They should be desegregated. The young women graduating form schools should find the best school available to them and Sefardi or Ashkenazi should not be a consideration.  And yes, the Ashkenazi Haredim are equally responsible for this segregation, not just Shas but Shas was created to perpetuate this. "Elite" schools will still be snobby and exclusive but girls should be able to go to any school and where her grandfather was born should not be a consideration. The young generation of Israelis, yes, even Israeli Haredim, have such minor differences, if any at all, between Sefardi girls and boys and Ashkenazi girls and boys that none of this should matter any longer. They have all grown up together by now in Israel, not in Morocco or Tunisia or Krakow or Warsaw.

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