Conference Agenda

This study delves into the inaugural year of the Youth Aliyah initiative, focusing on the integration of approximately 60 teenage immigrants from Germany into Kibbutz Ein Charod in 1934. Led by Recha Freier and Henrietta Szold, Youth Aliyah aimed to rescue Jewish youth from Nazi Germany and facilitate their migration to Palestine for education and vocational training. Through an analysis of archival documents and personal accounts, this research illuminates the complexities of assimilation and cultural adaptation faced by these young immigrants in a new socio-political landscape. The study examines the diverse perspectives of project organizers, educational leaders, and the immigrant cohort itself, shedding light on evolving educational objectives and ideological shifts within the initiative's framework. Furthermore, it explores the tensions between socialist communal ideologies and the individual identities of the immigrant youth, highlighting the challenges and successes of the integration process. By contextualizing the experiences of the first Youth Aliyah cohort within broader discussions of diversity and education, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of historical efforts to address cultural plurality within educational frameworks.

Regulating education has been an important issue on the agenda since the establishment of the State of Israel. Although the field of education was greatly developed before the establishment of the state, it was subsequently given a legal push by the legislature – the Knesset – and supported by executive branch arrangements. The pioneer in regulating education was the Compulsory Education Law, one of the first laws enacted by the Knesset in general, which established free of charge basic education for children from kindergarten to age 14, in September 1949. Through the law, the legislators sought to deal with what was considered as a major problem back then – children who wandered the streets of cities, engaged in petty peddling, passed their time idle, deteriorated into crime or were suspected – due to social "moral anxiety" – of being prone to delinquency. Added to this situation was another phenomenon that affected the social climate: the Great Aliyah, which changed the demographic balance and added hundreds of thousands of Jews to the existing Jewish core at various levels of exposure to education and Moderna. This immigration turned education into a burning problem and was another source of moral anxieties among the citizens of the new state, who watched with trepidation the process of change in the society of the Yishuv they knew. The expression of the Compulsory Education Law in various sources, particularly in children's literature of the 1950s, indicates the zeitgeist and the state of mind in the fields of law and politics. Writing about it emphasizes the attitudes toward a need to improve education among all children, while emphasizing the origin of the main target audience of the law: Mizrahi Jews from Islamic countries – parents and children – and their alleged connection to crime and delinquency.

The year 1968 marked the launch of Israel's ambitious School-Structure Reform, a cornerstone of the Ministry of Education's social equality policy during the golden age of the nation's welfare state. This initiative embodied the government's political aspiration to transform schools into egalitarian spaces where students from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds would purposefully, systematically, and structurally encounter one another. This encounter was named "educational integration", after the American model of school-integration. The program aimed to bridge social gaps and forge a cohesive Jewish society within the newly established nation-state. The Israeli Integration aimed for two distinct groups: Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews. This division - which originated in the different countries of origin of the Jews before the establishment of the State of Israel, on the one hand, the Islamic countries (Mizrahim), on the other hand, Europe (Ashkenazim) - not only represented contrasting ethnicities but also starkly different class realities, with Mizrahim predominantly occupying the lower working class and Ashkenazim entrenched in the middle and upper strata. My presentation delves into the intricate process of translating this multifaceted policy into practical measures on the ground. I specifically trace the genesis of the "integration Formula", the 60:40 ratio deemed ideal for balancing working-class Mizrahi students with middle-class Ashkenazi counterparts. The presentation sheds light on the rationale behind this specific ratio and explores the role played by the 1966 Coleman Report from the United States in its formulation. I will argue that the decision-making process within the Israeli Ministry of Education primarily relied on intuition rather than robust research. The translation of policy into practice, I contend, was heavily influenced by value-laden principles rather than concrete empirical data.