Israel’s high school teachers have been on strike now for over six weeks. Their salary is a sad joke. A teacher’s salary should be much higher than seaport workers or electric company employees. The responsibility that a teacher shoulders is much greater than the responsibility shouldered by people in much more lucrative professions. Over ten years ago, I had already written an article on the need to raise teachers’ salaries to reflect their honored status in Israeli society. 

But the ills of Israel’s educational system do not stem from low salaries. They stem from lack of substance. Even if the teacher’s salaries were doubled, I don’t think that something substantive would change in the great values vacuum of the educational system.  

The excuse for the low salaries is, of course, that there is no money. But last week the media announced that millionaire Lev Levayev had offered to establish and fund an entire Jewish studies enrichment program in Israel’s schools. Educational Minister Yuli Tamir, however, rejected the offer. Tamir’s values system is foreign to Jewish values. In both her public and personal life, Tamir represents Israel’s small minority that is estranged from Judaism. She is the antithesis of the Jewish majority that wishes to afford its children a solid Jewish identity. 

A nation’s education is based on its culture. Israel’s leftist leaders attempted to create a new culture in our country, disconnected from its original, Jewish culture. What they created instead is the depths of despair and hopelessness that Israeli society is experiencing today -- hopelessness that produces negative and even terminal phenomena.  

Since she entered her position as Education Minister, Yuli Tamir has done her best to see to it that Israel’s children will not be exposed to their original Jewish culture. She has decreased the hours devoted to Jewish tradition, cancelled hours of Jewish heritage and replaced them with the “heritage of the Palestinian Nation” and Naqba (the Palestinian holocaust, a.k.a. the founding of the State of Israel) studies. She has cut down on the number of National Service girls who teach Jewish studies in the non-religious schools (because they “influence Israeli society with their extreme opinions”). Tamir cancelled the Bible studies program in which religious yeshivah boys taught Torah in non-religious schools. She significantly decreased the hours in the religious schools and added them to the Arab schools. She attempted to prevent the Ariel college in Samaria from achieving university status. She made Rabin’s Heritage studies a requirement; in other words, the Peace Now heritage is now required study in every classroom in Israel. In addition, she cut back the funding for Israel’s colleges and did all that she could to slash funding to religious institutions. 

It is no wonder that many Israeli youngsters do not understand what they are doing here. It is no wonder that they cannot complete the verse,” Shemah Yisrael,” that they have never visited Jerusalem (even though they have traveled abroad here and there) and that as soon as they finish their army service, they stand in line to receive German or Polish passports. 

The teachers must be paid much more. But if we do not imbue our educational system with Jewish substance, the positive effect of the increase will be negligible.

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