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Comments (0)Israel’s Education Ministry will allow the establishment of a private Chasidic school in the settlement where a controversy erupted over Ashkenazi-Sephardic segregation.
The school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel will be privately funded but will be bound to follow certain guidelines, including no discrimination.
The ministry said it approved the parents’ request to open the school after “taking into consideration the parent’s desire to educate their daughters in a Chasidic religious communal educational environment, with a different spiritual leadership, and unique and more strict characteristics than the ones existing in the current school.”
The ministry rejected the idea of transporting the students to schools in other communities because there are security risks involved in traveling from a relatively isolated West Bank settlement.
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled last spring that the religious girl’s school in Emanuel remove physical barriers between students in the regular and Chasidic track. Most of the students in the regular school are Sephardic and most in the Chasidic track are Ashkenazi, which led to charges of racism.
Dozens of parents of the Chasidic students were jailed for refusing to send their daughters to the school following the removal of the separations. Under an agreement between the parents and the court, the students attended the last week of school together, pending a decision on opening a new school for the 2010-11 school year.
Planner of Munich Olympic Massacre Dies
A planner of the 1972 attack on Israel’s Olympic team in Munich and one of the founders of the Palestinian security services has died.
Amin al-Hindi died in a hospital in Amman last week of liver and pancreatic cancer. He was 70.
Eleven Israeli athletes were kidnapped and later killed during the Munich Olympics, along with five Palestinians and a German policeman.
Al-Hindi was head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service and close to former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. During the 1970s he also served as a senior security officer in Fatah. He supported the peace process with Israel and the Oslo Accords after the Palestinian Authority’s founding in the 1990s.
Al-Hindi slipped into a coma following surgery last week, according to the Palestinian Envoy to Jordan. He will be buried in his native Gaza Strip.
The main architect of the massacre, Mohammed Daoud Odeh, also known as Abu Daoud, died last month at age 73.
Aviv Geffen to Open for U2
Israeli rock musician Aviv Geffen will be the opening act for U2.
Geffen will join SnowPatrol in warming up the crowd at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece on Sept. 3 for U2’s 360 Tour, Geffen announced on his website.
Geffen released his first album in English last year. In addition to being a solo artist, he performed with British musician Steven Wilson as the Blackfield Duo.