Haredim Exclude Sefardim From City-Run Community Center

Incident newest in a long string of haredi anti-Sefardi bias.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Segregation of Sephardi girls in haredi seminaries is not a new issue. The humiliation experienced by girls who had to stay at home for months without studying because of their parents' ethnic origins has been written about at length. The haredi establishment has always argued that these are private institutions and thus have the right to set their own rules. But now the municipality is being faced with an attempt to enforce these rules in a community center, a facility that falls under the auspices of the municipality.

In response to complaints filed by local residents, the municipality's legal adviser Yossi Havilio has ruled that an advertisement placed by the neighborhood administration in the haredi part of Ramot inviting young girls registered at the Beit Ya'acov seminaries and boys studying in heder (the elementary classes in haredi stream education) to register for after-school activities "totally ignores non-Ashkenazi children" and is therefore "incompatible with the requirements of the law."

The words "Sephardi" or "Ashkenazi" were not mentioned, of course, but in Ramot and elsewhere, the institutions mentioned above are synonymous with Ashkenazi institutions, and the very realistic fear of Sephardi haredi parents is that their struggle for equality is far from reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Not only are schools inaccessible to their children, but now even the community center is forcing them out.…