At a stormy meeting, the members of the executive board of
the Iggud Hatatim (Talmud Torah Association) angrily
criticized the Jerusalem Municipality's intention to cut the
forthcoming year's budget of its Chareidi Chinuch Department
by 25%.
Throughout the meeting, statistics were presented indicating
that the city plans to deduct 7.5 million shekels, from the
talmudei Torah's current 26 million shekel budget for
educational, administrative and social activities. The
directors of the institutions warned that if the city council
carries out its intentions, every student in the city's
talmudei Torah will receive only 12 shekels ($2.75) a
month, and a student in a higher yeshiva-educational
framework, only 2 shekels ($0.50) a month.
The principals of the talmudei Torah claimed that the
municipality has decreased its participation in their
expenses of (exclusive of wages) by 20%, and that the budgets
of the seminaries for girls will be cut by 80%, meaning that
1.3 million shekels will be deducted from the seminaries'
current budget of 1.6 million shekels. The municipality's
participation in the activities of the pre-kindergarten
classes will also be cut by 20%.
The principals also pointed to comparative statistics which
prove that the 60,000 children of the talmudei Torah
of Jerusalem will receive a budget of 1.4 million shekel,
while an identical number of students studying in secular
frameworks will receive 13 million shekels for similar types
of programs.
The principals of the talmudei Torah say that it is
outrageous that the city's children are discriminated
against, based solely on their background. At the meeting,
the principals recalled Mayor Olmert's frequent expressions
of pride in the equal opportunities afforded to Jerusalem's
children, as far as educational conditions are concerned, and
that his declarations that he would take measures in order to
correct the ongoing budgetary policies of former mayors, who
discriminated against chareidi educational frameworks.
The talmud Torah principals complained that not only
has the municipality failed to update the budget in a
realistic manner, in light of the erosion of the budget, the
rise of the indices, and the price increments, but it has
even cut the nominal budget. All this, they said, is in
addition to the amounts already deducted during the current
year in order to balance the budget of '98.
The director of the Chareidi Education Department, Rabbi Meir
Fishman, who was at the emergency meeting, heard the
talmudei Torah principals point to the negligible
amount of renovations made in the talmudei Torah at
the opening of the current school year, noting that even
conditions which the Education Ministry had deemed security
hazards were not repaired.
At the end of the stormy meeting, it was decided to report on
the situation to the gedolei Yisroel. It was also
decided to hold an urgent meeting with UTJ's representatives
in the city council and the Knesset, and to request that they
anchor the status of the talmudei Torah in the
budgetary records, in consonance with the treatment accorded
all the city's other official educational systems.
