Parents of students in a Chabad kindergarten in Kfar Yona have refused to send their children to school because the school accepted several Ethiopian Jewish children as students. In total, 34 children are staying home to protest the inclusion of the Ethiopian Jews.
Ynet reports that parents of students in a Chabad kindergarten in Kfar Yona have refused to send their children to school because the school accepted several Ethiopian Jewish children as students. In total, 34 children are staying home to protest the inclusion of the Ethiopian Jews.
Chabad's late rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, told the late head of Chabad's Israel schools network, Berke Wolfe, not to accept Ethiopian students unless they were born to parents who had undergone a full conversion to Judaism or had done so themselves, and this has been the policy most Chabad schools have followed.
But like many Chabad preschools and kindergartens in the Diaspora that accept students who are not Jewish according to its version of halakha (Orthodox Jewish law) – usually as means of making money or to gain regular access to the parents to try to convert the non-Jewish spouse (or break up the marriage) – the Kfar Yona school registered the Ethiopian Jews.
You can read a number of stories on Chabad and Ethiopian Jews here, here, and here.