Placing Ethiopian immigrant children in religious schools "has greatly harmed the group's integration into the wider society, and has left them a coerced religious sector," Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz said yesterday.
Due to the Chief Rabbinate's strict conversion requirements, the majority of Ethiopian children attend state religious schools.
"No ethnic group or immigrant group is required to study in one system. We need to stop discriminating against the Ethiopian sector and to endlessly find faults with their Jewishness," Pines-Paz said in initiating a bill to facilitate secular education for Ethiopian children.
This week, a state religious school in Petah Tikva was found to have isolated four second-grade Ethiopian pupils from the other children, teaching them in a separate classroom and scheduling their recess at a different hour. The school reportedly said the Ethiopian children were not religious enough to mix with the other children.
"Although it is very late, the time has come to redeem the [Ethiopian] sector from the isolation that was forced upon it," Pines-Paz said.
