EMBRACING SEGREGATION: THE RISE OF A RELIGIOUS EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN ISRAEL (SHAS).

The paper focuses on the emergence of a new religious-ethnic educational stream in Israel, Maayan Hachinuch Hatorani, ("The Wellspring of Torah Education"). It was founded in 1984 and is controlled by the leadership of Shas, a movement of religious renewal and Sephardic-Oriental identity. Discriminatory policies, implemented by the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi establishment, brought the leaders of the Shas movement to initiate a new system capable of responding to the hardship of a marginalized population. Shas schools, functioning within and being supported by the Ministry of Education, also became socializing agents for children and parents that were far from religious lifestyle. Thus, through the creation of strategies for the transmission of knowledge and behavior, the new stream challenges the secular national project, and contributes to the formation of a new cultural sphere. In this paper we explore how a religious movement embraces education to foster social mobilization and group solidarity. The research is an ethnographic study that was conducted between 2000-2005 in three cities in Israel. By transforming cultural boundaries and institutionalizing norms that contradict in some respects the principles underlying the relationship between government and mass schooling, Shas's education systems contributes to forge an Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Judaism based on an ethnic type of primordial identity. The case contributes to understand the challenges that religion holds to modern systems of education and to analyze new developments in Judaism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]