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27 Elul 5759 - September 8, 1999 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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News
Tvuno High School Students Allotted Classrooms

by Betzalel Kahn

Due to Mayor Ehud Olmert's intervention, the problem of the Tvunas Yaakov Bais Yaakov School in Ramot Alef of Jerusalem has been solved. Despite promises from City Hall that it was "making every effort to find a building for the classrooms," it took negotiations and demonstrations to procure a location for the school. Finally, they were given space on the campus of a school in Ramot.

School was to begin last Sunday. In spite of repeated letters and pleas sent to the municipality's administration months beforehand, the students had nowhere to go on their first day of school. That day, in Safra Square, the tenth grade students demonstrated against the Jerusalem Municipality, which still hadn't found a suitable structure for the school.

The neighborhood community center (Matnas, long a bitter foe of the religious community) in Ramot illegally transferred a group of senior citizens to the Naamat Center, which belongs to the city. A different apartment had been rented for the group on a nearby street. But when the community center got word that the chareidi school would, indeed, receive the structure designated for them, it transferred some of their elderly participants to the Naamat building which was vacant at the time, in defiance of the decision of the City Council's Dwelling Committee.

Parents of the Tvunas Yaakov School students asked, "Why doesn't the municipality evict the elderly people who invaded the place without a permit, as it did to the Esrog School? Why doesn't isn't it act as efficiently as it does when chareidi institutions invade abandoned municipal buildings? "

Municipality spokesman Chagai Elias, said, "Since the activities of the Naamat building are municipal, they don't require approval of the Dwelling Committee." This is not actually true. Two months ago a request regarding similar activities was filed with this committee, and it was rejected by a majority of votes of the committee members.

Students were taken to demonstrations to try to acquire learning facilities. Because of the heat in Safra Square at the time of the demonstrations, Jerusalem's deputy mayors, Rabbi Uri Lapolianski and Rabbi Uri Maklev, invited the girls into their offices, where they held their classes on the first day of school. They would have continued their studies in those offices had no other solution been found.

Sunday afternoon, the mayor learned that the school had no place and that the students were in City Hall. Due to pressure exerted on him by the deputy mayors, he called an urgent meeting with the director general of the municipality and instructed him to solve the problem immediately.

That night, Rabbi Lapolianski and the director general of the municipality, Raanan Dinor, visited the area in Ramot. They considered the various proposals of the local community center, and it became clear that they were all very costly. The best solution seemed to be to situate the school in trailers in the yard of the Yonatan Netanyahu School and in the school's synagogue.

During the visit, the director general said that he was astonished that the local community center was trying to dictate to the municipality regarding the use of structures owned by the city. Furthermore, he pointed out that there is no need to allocate large sums of money, when there are empty classrooms in the neighborhood.

Monday, the feverish deliberations between Rabbi Lapolianski, Rabbi Maklev and the mayor continued, wherein the suggestion was made to situate the students on the campus of the Yonatan Netanyahu school. To prove that all of the students were residents of the neighborhood, the deputy mayors transferred a list of all of the students to the municipality.

Monday, after concluding the agreement with the mayor, the members of the school's PTA thanked the administration of the municipality, Rabbi Lapolianski and Rabbi Maklev, who had remained staunch in their insistence on finding a suitable solution to the serious problem of the 96 students of the ninth and tenth grades.

Finally, on Tuesday morning, the Tvunas Yaakov students commenced their studies in the trailers of the Yonatan Netanyahu and in its synagogue.


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