Some 170 heads of local authorities, on Sunday sent a strong-worded letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Education Minister Yoav Kisch, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in which they warm that they would not agree to fund the informal Haredi education schools, from their budgets.
"We will not agree to the preferential treatment of one sector of the population over another," they wrote.
In their letter, the 170 mayors and regional heads said that coalition agreements signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ultra-Orthodox parties, would require local authorities to subsidize 75% of the Haredi educational institutions in their localities and would circumvents their own decisions and considerations.
3 View gallery
Haim Bibas, head of The Federation of Local Authorities in Israel
(Photo: Motti Kimchi)
"We will not allow a system that bypasses local authority for the benefit of unofficial educational institutions over official educational institutions, and we will not let the state use agreements to expropriate the authority of local government and their responsibility to their residents.
"We have been observing with concern, as coalition agreements were signed dealing with education. Impacting the autonomy of local governments and burdening them with the funding of those institutions, will deter from the ability to fund our residents, and we cannot allow this to happen," the leaders including Haim Bibas, head of The Federation of Local Authorities in Israel, Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv among others, wrote.
"Recognition of informal educational institutions (which are primarily part of the Haredi school systems) including the licensing of institutional exemptions, is done by the state, and therefore the state must fund them."
Some of the signatories of the letter were members of Netanyahu's Likud party and supporters of the prime minister.