On Monday, the Education, Culture and Sports Committee discussed the issue of student resilience during the war in the context of blurring the values of Zionism, heritage, and identity in the education system. Several of the MKs expressed their belief that more education about Judaism was necessary.

“Our education system has been conquered,” said the head of the Meirim organization Dorit Yitzhak. “My child from first to fourth grade did not study Torah in the state school. This year they did not celebrate Tu B’Shevat there, and last year they did not celebrate Jerusalem Day. In my second son’s civics classes, progressive leftist values ​​were inculcated. We conducted a survey of 1,000 parents and teachers from around the country, from which it appears that the children do not know enough and the teachers do not teach enough. They are powerless because of the system.”

In the survey presented to the Education Committee, 80% of parents think that following the war and the massacre on October 7, it is necessary for students to learn more about the heritage of the Jewish people. Another figure shows that only 27% of parents think that the education system provides an appropriate response to the issues of the heritage of the Jewish people.

MK Galit Distal Atbarian (Likud) said excitedly: “The state education system robbed me of my identity. And what is happening now is a thousand times worse. Judaism is a treasure of embodied knowledge, a diamond. We are forced to ignore this diamond because people do not know what is there. An ignorant generation grew up here. In Gaza there is Allah. We had the roots cut off from under our feet. I studied philosophy for 7 years. It’s dust compared to the diamond we sit on and bury.”

“I read the data according to which the vast majority of teachers in Israel claim that there is not enough study [of Judaism] or Jewish identity in schools. And the vast majority of parents in Israel claim the same thing. I say with deep pain, I only learned at a late age that Judaism is dynamic. In South Korea they introduced the study of the Talmud. As a matter of fact, why was this denied to me, why did I not know until my late age,” said the Likud MK in pain.

“Our children don’t know what it is to be Jewish, they have no idea. I’m studying today and I say, ‘God, if only I had known this at a younger age’. I see our soldiers today, and I see how their souls thirst for it,” said Distal Atabrian.

In conclusion, she asserted: “I want to say that Israel needs to reboot the education system. Judaism is not the other is me or the progressive approach to the Mishnah and the Bible. Judaism is an eternal truth. We are sitting on eternal truth and we are sitting on a diamond, and the time has come for us to access this diamond, this spirituality that has humanity in it, that has the basis of universal morality.” She concluded: “Israelis are growing up here who think that their identity is that they like pizza.”

MK Meir Cohen (Yesh Atid) agreed.

“The desire to compromise with everyone has meant that the Ministry of Education does not understand its role in the Jewish state,” Cohen said. “I am neither religious nor right-wing, and I feel this erosion.”

MK Tali Gottlieb (Likud) also agreed.

“We recognize in the students an erosion of the Jewish ethos and heritage in the State of Israel. In the education system there is a deep state of associations that come in and assimilate radical ideas. I don’t know who supervises them. This is how we find students in whom the Jewish ethos is not evident. The definition of my country is Jewish as well as democratic.”

MK Hanoch Milevetsky (Likud): “The state education system is not relevant to a large part of the Jewish citizens here. It should reflect the fact that Israel is Jewish and democratic. We constantly talk about democratic and forget about the Jewish. We are stuck with crazy ideas thinking that we are pluralists but that is not the role of the education system. Its role is to connect to the roots and essence of the establishment of the State of Israel, the only state for the Jewish people.”

MK Limor Son Har Melech (Otzma Yehudit): “When I studied in my youth in a state school, there were no Bible studies at all and no heritage. Today it is even more so. It is impossible for there to be a divine soul that does not know what its mission is in this world. Every Jew has the right to learn who and why he was born specifically to the Jewish people.”