'Meteoric' Rise in Religious Education in Tel Aviv

Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs Eli Ben-Dahan (Jewish Home) on the first day of classes Monday visited the “Reishit” school in Tel Aviv, a rapidly growing religious school in the traditionally secular city.

At the school, located in southern Tel Aviv, Ben-Dahan spoke before hundreds of students. Reishit boasts some 400 students, the highest number in its history.

If the students "work hard they can get to anywhere they want. Any one of you can be an IDF general, a rabbi, minister, or director of a large company," remarked Ben-Dahan at the school. "We need faith in religious and state matters."

"You are beginning your studies with mutual assistance, faith and the security that Israel belongs to us. With our faith we will defeat our enemies,” added the deputy minister.

According to Itai Garnak, head of the 'Zehut' Jewish values organization, there has been a “meteoric” rise in the number of students enrolled in religious state schools in Tel Aviv this year.

"We opened two first grade classes in all six religious elementary schools in Tel Aviv," he said. "There has been a real sprouting of religious education in the city this year."

Garnak said that many of the students are “refugees” from state secular schools who are now attending the religious schools as their families become more observant. ....

Hardly surprising. Zionism does not work without an underlying reason for being in Israel. The Holocaust doesn't work to motivate Zionism, because then the leftists start comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. The naked gratuitousness of the charge is irrelevant. It is not meant to be an assault on Israel based on facts and logic. It is an attack on a threadbare rationale for being.

The only sustainable rationale is that this land was promised to us by G-d. Incredibly, this is a rationale that Muslims must agree with, because it says so right in the Quraan (see http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/28575/allah-is-a-zionist for an Islamic view on this). That is precisely why religious Jews terrify Muslims, why the Sbarro Pizza on R. Jaffe in Jerusalem was suicide-bombed. As Ahlam Tamimi, one of the Sbarro accomplices released to free Gilat Shalit has said on the record, has said (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ahlam+tamimi), she chose Sbarro as her target for the religious Jooos! who frequent it.

Secular Tel Avivites are coming to realize that the jig is up. Either they must either give up their secularism or give up their Zionism and go elsewhere in the world. Not surprising, then, that so many are choosing the true rationale for remaining in Israel, and with it the more wholesome lifestyle of commitment to family and community, rather than to self.

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