On Monday the Welfare Ministry completed the transfer of over
NIS 30 million to Torah institutions with dormitory
facilities. Based on directives from Rabbi Ravitz these
monies were transferred to the yeshivas for the 5765 budget
year.
Rabbi Ravitz praised the staff of the Department of Public
Institutions and expressed his satisfaction with the transfer
of the funds to their intending destinations and the
implementation of the decision to ease the process of
submitting requests.
When the Likud-Shinui-NRP government was set up, one of
Zevulun Orlev's first acts as head of the Welfare Ministry
was to slash funding for schools with dormitories and to set
new distribution criteria.
Before Orlev took office the dormitory budget was NIS 64
million and by the time he resigned it was down to NIS 22
million. Although some of this drop in funding can be
attributed to the various economic plans and general
cutbacks, the majority was a result of the Welfare Minister's
policy.
The dormitory budget is intended to help institutions with
students up to age 18. Orlev held that the existing criteria
favored chareidi yeshivas and institutions (mainly yeshiva
ketanos) and he would not stand for that. The changes he
introduced dealt a major blow to many chareidi yeshivas, some
of which lost all of their dorm funding.
When Rabbi Avrohom Ravitz took over the Welfare Ministry, it
was clear that his first task would be to restore the dorm
funding, especially since the only reason the money had been
taken away was because Zevulun Orlev did not like the color
of the yarmulkes on the students' heads. Rabbi Ravitz spent
months working hard to restore the original budget, more or
less.
In exchange for UTJ's support for the 2005 budget the Likud
and the government promised to transfer NIS 290 million for
various purposes determined by the UTJ. One of UTJ's demands
was NIS 30 million for the Welfare Ministry in order to
increase the dorm budget from NIS 22 million to NIS 52
million. When the money eventually arrived, Rabbi Ravitz and
a team of ministry officials set to work reformulating the
criteria. They removed the preferences given to institutions
where the students take matriculation exams and instead of
requiring families of eligible students to have at least four
children living at home, now three is sufficient.
Amnon de Hartoch, the official at the Justice Ministry whose
job is, in effect, to create obstacles in any criteria for
funding that chareidi organizations or institutions could
benefit from, tried to heap obstacles on the criteria Rabbi
Ravitz formulated, but Rabbi Ravitz prevailed.
The Welfare Ministry's legal advisor, Batya Hartman who took
part in drawing up the new criteria and expressed her support
for them, met with de Hartoch and managed to convince him
that they are more just than the former set of criteria and
that it makes no sense to block their approval.
Rabbi Ravitz has nothing but praise for his ministry's legal
advisor. "She has definitely done good work in dealing with
de Hartoch and she helped advance the criteria and get them
approved, allowing us to begin the task of righting the wrong
and the discrimination the ministry caused before I arrived,"
he said.
The Welfare Ministry has already channeled some of the budget
supplements to the yeshivas and dormitories and now the time
has come for the yeshivas to fill out the forms. "The money
is sitting at the Ministry and is waiting to reach its
destination," says the Deputy Welfare Minister. "All we need
is for the institutions to submit their requests in an
orderly fashion."
For some reason the requests have been slow in coming. The
legal deadline has already passed and since only a small
number of requests were received Rabbi Ravitz granted a 21-
day extension to 20 Kislev (21 Dec.), which is also about to
end.
"I simply don't understand why the forms have not been
submitted," says Rabbi Ravitz. "There are 270 institutions
around the country that can benefit from the dormitory budget
and only a few dozen forms have been submitted. This doesn't
make sense. I'm embarrassed before the Ministry. For months
we have been working intensively to formulate new criteria
and I have been prodding the Ministry staff and urging them
to do the job quickly because the institutions have been
waiting for the money, eager and penniless. And now, when the
time comes, the forms are not flowing in—as if the
dormitory institutions do not need this support. We are
talking about thousands of shekels for each dormitory and it
would be a shame for this money not to be used and to return
to the treasury."
Rabbi Ravitz is aware that the Welfare Ministry, upon orders
from the Finance Ministry, may have sent one or two more
forms to fill out than in the past, "but this certainly does
not justify or explain why they are not submitting the forms
so that they can receive the money from the Ministry," said
Rabbi Ravitz.
The 2006 budget book, based on orders from Rabbi Ravitz,
includes NIS 64 million earmarked for dormitories, exactly
the amount before Orlev took office. But the deadline for
this year's budget is about to end. Either principals will
rush to submit the forms or else apparently they do not need
the money?
