Israel Will Fund Matchmakers in Religious High Schools
Not Just Yeshiva: Israel’s complex state subsidies help fund education for religious students from grade school to beyond army service. Image by Getty Images
By Josefin Dolsten September 14, 2016
— Israel’s Education Ministry is funding matchmakers to work in public religious high schools starting this academic year.
The head of the ministry’s Religious Education Administration, Avraham Lifshitz, called on schools to hire counselors in order to help students in their last years of studies find spouses, according to Haaretz. As part of the program, counselors would also create lists of young men and women eligible for marriage.
The Education Ministry did not provide a budget for the program, but said counselors will receive 30-60 hours of training.
The program received pushback from some educators in religious schools.
“The schools shouldn’t get involved in matchmaking,” said one anonymous teacher, according to Haaretz. “It’s not our job to collect names and create a database of acquaintances. If there’s a large community of bachelors and bachelorettes, as the letter says, it would be better to listen to them and understand what’s bothering them than to look for matches.”
Lifshitz initially thought about implementing the program only in religious girls’ schools, but ultimately decided to enact it in boys’ schools as well.
In Israel, religious and secular students attend separate public schools, and most religious middle and high schools are single sex.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
