Haaretz
Jewish schools are guilty of racial discrimination if they reject children on the grounds of their parentage, a British court has ruled.
In a decision that has shocked the country's 300,000-strong Jewish community, the Court of Appeal held that ongoing personal acts of faith, rather than birth or conversion, must define who is a Jew.
In doing so, the court overturned an earlier high court judgment upholding the decision of the JFS in London (the oldest and largest Jewish school in Britain) to deny a boy admission because it did not recognize his mother?s conversion.
The three judges, one of them Jewish, ruled that any selection criteria that gives ethnic priority to a Jew is showing racial discrimination. They cited the Race Relations Act 1976, which was introduced to prevent discrimination on the grounds of race.
The ruling means that Jewish schools of any denomination, whether privately or state funded, will be barred from giving priority to children who are born Jewish or who convert, and instead must consider how the children and their families practice their Judaism.
The move throws into disarray the admissions arrangements for Britain's 97 Orthodox schools and may force them to introduce "faith tests" - like church schools, which require fortnightly attendance at Sunday services. Such a radical intervention - unprecedented since the time of Oliver Cromwell - calls into question the relationship between church (or synagogue) and state. [...]
Our Rabbeim warned that if Judaism were to become a nationality or ethnicity rather than a religion that this would happen.
ReplyDeleteHashem Help Us!
The chareidi schools will probably not be effected by this because if the criteria is as the courts say, the way Judaism is practiced by the family, then they should not be any controversies. However in many Modern Orthodox day schools there might be a problem as there are many students who's parents are not frum.
ReplyDeleteThis however is an ironic law to be deployed in England for in order for one to have the crown one must be a member of the Church of England and be able to prove German ancestry of no more than three generations removed. This of course does not include the Windsor family which is obviously more than three generations removed nut that is through natural succession through inheritance.