In the wake of the Haifa Municipality’s refusal to allow a religious school to utilize a vacant nearby building, Betzedek, an Israeli non-profit organization chaired by Rabbi Yosef Rieder, prevailed upon the Education Ministry to persuade the municipality to reconsider the matter.

The large building, in the city’s Kiryat Chaim neighborhood, has been empty since the closing of the Netivim state school.for lack of sufficient students

Nearby stands the religious Nesivos Moshe School, part of the Chinuch Atzmai network and named after legendary Agudath Israel of America president Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l.  It operates in a rented facility and, due to insufficient space, has also been renting classrooms in nearby apartment buildings.

This past year, school administrators asked the municipality if the abandoned building might be allocated for the Chinuch Atzmai school’s use. The request was denied on the grounds that there were plans to convert the empty edifice into a library.

After the rebuff, the principal and other administrators of the Nesivos Moshe school turned to Betzedek.

Rabbi Mordechai Green, Betzedek’s director, wrote a letter to Haifa Mayor Yonah Yahav and to the department that oversees building allocations, asserting that a legal allocation procedure needed to be pursued before changing the function of a building from a school to a library – particularly in a case like the one at issue, where a nearby school is operating under cramped conditions and is expected to grow to over 300 students in the coming year.

The head of the Allocations Department refused to accede to the request that he follow the prescribed procedure, since, he maintained, the municipality had decided that it has other plans for the building.

For his part, Mayor Yahav said that the city is planning to build a new residential neighborhood nearby and that the municipality wishes to renovate the building and use it at some future point for a school.  What is more, he added, since the Nesivos Moshe School includes students who come from other cities and towns, the municipality is not responsible for their learning conditions. The mayor did, however, pledge to try to find Nesivos Moshe an alternate building.

After receiving Mayor Yahav’s reply, Betzedek wrote to the Education Minister and the department responsible for buildings detailing the severity of the situation and asserting that there was no justification for its turning the building into a library.  As to Mayor Yahav’s assertion regarding a future neighborhood, Betzedek noted that many years will pass until the fruition of any such plan, and that it seemed unreasonable to keep a needed building empty because of plans for a distant future – when, in any event, other sites and edifices will in the interim likely become available for use.

Betzedek also communicated its intention, in the event the municipality refuses to allocate the school to Nesivos Moshe, to mount a legal challenge to that decision.

Shortly thereafter, the buildings department and Ministry of Education acted to require the municipality to consider Nesivos Moshe’s request in good faith.
 
This week, the legal advisor to the municipality informed Betzedek that the committee had scheduled a meeting for that purpose in several days.  Nesivos Moshe was also asked by the committee to provide updated information pertaining to the case.

Betzedek continues to closely follow the case and its officials maintain that a happy resolution of the situation will bode well for other schools facing similar obstacles, encouraging them to make their own cases to local authorities.