The chairman of the Knesset's Interior and Environment Committee, MK Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor), initiated a bill Tuesday to facilitate secular school education for children from the Ethiopian sector in order to help them better assimilate into Israeli society.
Ethiopian children are not legally required to study at religious schools, but because of the Rabbinate's strict conversion requirements, the majority is educated in the government's religious schools.
"This has greatly harmed the group's integration into the entire society, and has left them a coerced religious sector," said Pines-Paz.
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"No ethnic group or immigrant group is required to study in one system. We need to stop to discriminate against the Ethiopian sector and to endlessly find faults with their Jewishness," he said.
This week, an incident of discrimination against Ethiopian students was revealed at a state religious school in Petah Tikva, which further encouraged Pines-Paz to alter what he called an historic error. "Although it is very late, the time has come to redeem the sector from the isolation that was forced upon it," he said.
The bill also includes legislation stipulated that any institution that receives governmental funding and works with Ethiopian children will treat each student equally both in the religious and secular school systems. This would obligate both the Chief Rabbinate and the rabbinical courts.
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