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New Rabbinical Restrictions Against Haredi Women´s "Careerism"



Regulations by Israel’s Ministry of Education requiring that a significant portion of the instructors teaching would-be educators have a master’s degree or doctorate have set off a chain of events likely to lead to growing poverty in the hareidi-religious sector.

The Ministry of Education's policy impacts on the hareidi community; since there are a limited number of eligible hareidi professors with second or third degrees, hareidi education students have been exposed to a wide variety of teachers, some of whom were deemed not kosher enough by the hareidi rabbis.

Thus the Rabbinical Committee on Education, the official body that sets educational policy for most of the hareidi community’s institutions, recently issued new guidelines cancelling all academic programs resulting in a bachelor's degree. As well, a significant number of courses will be downgraded and a large number of lecturers fired.

The rabbinic ruling handed down recently is likely to dramatically impact on hareidi women in the workplace many of whom earn a living as teachers. They will no longer be able to pursue academic degrees in education in Beit Ya’akov, Israel's largest chain of educational institutions for women. The ruling is likely to limit their future earning capabilities, as teachers with advanced degrees earn more than those without them.

The cancellation resulted from a growing concern among rabbis that hareidi women were being taught inappropriate materials, or were being instructed by professors who are not sufficiently pious.

“For some reason, we have found, in recent years, that courses are taught by foreign lecturers,” ran an editorial in Beit Ne’eman, Yated Ne’eman’s women’s supplement. “Some of these lecturers belong to the Mizrahi stream, and others, to great shame, are secular through and through ... there is danger here of contamination.”

The entry of large numbers of hareidi women into the workforce followed the bankruptcy in 1992 of Olympia & York Developments - the privately-owned Toronto, Canada-based real estate firm whch was building the huge Canary Wharf project in London, Britain. As a result the Reichmann family, the billionaire patrons who had subsidized much of Israel's hareidi world, were compelled to curtail their once vast philanthropy.

That historic bankruptcy and shutting of the cash spigot engendered a subtle revolution in the hareidi sector in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and elsewhere. Pressed to support their Torah-studying husbands and large families, increasing numbers of ultra-Orthodox women joined the workforce, a trend endorsed by several key rabbis and seen by many as essential to the community’s economic health.

The recent decree against higher education, described as “an earthquake” by Yated Ne’eman, Israel’s largest circulation hareidi newspaper, was issued by a group of rabbis who set the community’s educational policies, and was led by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv of Jerusalem (pictured above).

Rabbi Elyashiv, 96, is the paramount leader of Israel's Lithuanian non-Hasidic hareidi Ashkenazi Jews (sometimes called by the old label of misnagdim) who regard him as the posek ha-dor (Hebrew: "decisor [of] the generation"), the modern leading authority on halacha, or Jewish law.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=118856