Ultra-Orthodox Jews plan mass protests against religious school integration ruling

Israel braces for mass protests by Ultra-Orthodox

JERUSALEM — Ultra-Orthodox Jews have called mass demonstrations on Thursday to protest a Supreme Court ruling forcing the integration of a religious girls’ school.

The showdown shines a spotlight on a wide array of social issues Israel has been grappling with for years, including discrimination inside the Jewish community, the disproportionate clout of the country’s ultra-Orthodox minority and the precarious state of the country’s education system.

Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls’ school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don’t want their children to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren’t racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that families of the Sephardi girls aren’t religious enough.

Israel’s Supreme Court rejected that argument, and told the parents that the school must be integrated. It ruled that the dozens of parents who have defied the integration efforts by keeping their daughters from school are to be jailed on Thursday for two weeks.

More than 10,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews were expected to turn out in support of the Ashkenazi parents in various places across the country, with the main rally scheduled for Jerusalem. Thousands of police officers will be deployed to secure the demonstrations, police said, and both police and rescue services went on heightened alert.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority of some 650,000 Jews — just under 10 percent of the nation’s population — is an insular community that has been known to riot over the state’s intrusion into its affairs.

On Wednesday, ultra-Orthodox hurled rocks and bottles and torched garbage bins to protest a hotel construction project that they say will disturb Jewish graves.

The ultra-Orthodox have also come under criticism for maintaining a separate, state-funded school system that focuses on religious studies and gives short shrift to the general studies that form the basic core curriculum of schools where secular or modern Orthodox Israelis study.