The family of two Ethiopian-Israeli school-age girls has sued a religious public school in Lod and the Education Ministry for discrimination after their registration was conditioned on proof of conversion.
Tebeka – Advocacy for Justice & Equality for Ethiopian Israelis – announced the lawsuit, which seeks NIS 100,000 in damages, for the first time on Monday, though it was filed with the Rehovot Magistrate’s Court last week.
According to the complaint, the entire family was born Jewish and the State of Israel has recognized them as such, without requiring conversion.
As such, the complaint said that there was no conversion document to present to the school, which rejected their registration – unwilling to accept them as Jewish in light of their skin color and Ethiopian background.
Further, the complaint stated that conditioning registration for school on proof of conversion “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 minor girls approached the Lod religious public school known as “Shuvu” in February 2018 to register her daughters for the next school year.
The complaint then said that the mother and the family lead a religious lifestyle and she wanted her daughters to receive a religious education at the local educational institution for her area, which was Shuvu.
Initially, in April 2018, Shuvu school official Verdit Urbach took the mother and the girls on a tour of the school and completed various registration processes with them.
Urbach gave the family the impression that the girls had passed any educational vetting requirements and would be notified of their acceptance to the school within the week, said the lawsuit.
When she did not contact the family for more than a week, the mother contacted Urbach herself.
At this point, the complaint said that Urbach said that the girls could not be admitted because the registration was full.
However, the mother then called back separately without identifying herself and merely generically asking if registration was still open, and was told there were still spaces.
In addition, the mother contacted other parents who told her that their registration was not being held up by a lack of space.
AT THIS POINT, the mother sought and obtained a meeting with the principal of the school asking why her daughters were being blocked from registration when plainly the school had room for them.
Approximately 30 minutes after that meeting, the lawsuit said that Urbach called and informed the mother that she could only register her children if she presented a conversion certificate proving Jewishness.
When the mother told Urbach that she was born Jewish – which was recognized by the state so she had no basis for seeking a conversion, let alone a certificate – Urbach allegedly responded that this was the school’s procedure and that, without such a certificate, her daughters’ applications would be rejected.
The mother then verified with other non-Ethiopian parents that they had not been asked for proof of conversion or Jewishness.
Although an Education Ministry official condemned discrimination and committed to equality for Ethiopians when a news item was publicized about the issue, in practice, any ministry officials involved in the case either supported the school or took no action, the complaint said.
The complaint makes similar allegations against the Lod municipality.
For years, Ethiopian-Israelis have complained of discrimination in education and in the workplace despite laws prohibiting it.
Moreover, they have complained that national authorities often react with impatience or annoyance to such allegations and rarely tackle them unless some kind of a public relations campaign is created which embarrasses them into action.
Specifically, there have been complaints that certain religious schools sometimes try to discriminate against Ethiopian-Israelis claiming substantive objections to their Jewishness.
But Israeli law only allows a process of requiring verification of Jewishness for marriage purposes – and even at that stage, many leading religious figures, such as former Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, did not formally require conversion.
There are other groups of Ethiopians, such as the Falush Mura, who do require conversion to be recognized as Jewish because of a specific history of forced conversions to Christianity.
The Education Ministry had yet to respond by press time.
Tebeka CEO Tomer Marsha said his organization “views the incident gravely and will act to apply the law with regard to all of the officials involved so that such… harmful and racist incidents will not recur and [Tebeka] will act to uproot the phenomenon from its roots.”