The Blogs: 120 Kids. No School. Ra’anana fails Religious Sector

For over half a year, 120 children in Ra’anana have been left stranded without a school.

And the reason is simple: the municipality, elected and funded by the residents, has chosen to work against its residents. Instead of serving their needs, they have decided to serve a political agenda.

These children were not abandoned by accident. They were blocked.

What is the story?

10 Chabad kindergartens operate in Ra’anana, all overflowing with waiting lists.

Parents have for years been demanding a formal continuation of this education into primary school.

The municipality has dragged its feet time after time.

In 2022 the city agreed to formally recognize the school. Due to a high level of demand, the Chabad school began operating privately and informally, with the municipality’s knowledge, and even with its support.

During this time, Chabad requested to operate a municipality run Mamlachti Charedi school, which would teach both secular and religious studies. Isn’t this what the state has demanded time after time – state run schools that teach both types of education to the nation’s children.

This could have been an excellent solution.

But the city refused to open a Mamlachti Charedi school, despite the fact that under the law there should be one in each city. Ra’anana has zero Mamlachti Charedi schools in its city.

This refusal persists despite more than 30 years of growth in Ra’anana’s religious population, during which not a single new religious school has been built, even as demand has steadily and significantly increased.

This refusal also comes despite repeated admissions by officials in letters and in official meetings that existing state-religious schools are overcrowded.

(Attached letter from the municipality from 2022).

(Attached similar admission from an official meeting in Dec 2025).

As a result of the municipality’s refusal under any circumstance to open a state-religious Charedi school despite demand from its residents, parents were forced to try and hold together their school (operating for over 3 years with support from the municipality) under a “recognized but unofficial” status, not by choice, but by necessity.

When the municipality refused to provide its residents a building for a school that is in high demand in the city, the parents acted responsibly.

They found and leased a building privately at 23 Ahuzah Street, a building designated for public use. They collectively invested millions of their own money in renovations – a fortune for private residents. No public funding was used, not for rent, not for construction. All permits were processed correctly and legally.

Throughout the process, no support was provided by the Ra’anana municipality – supposedly meant to serve its residents.

In fact, rather than supporting these residents, the municipality seemed to actively obstruct the process, sending them into bureaucratic dead ends instead of providing practical assistance, even as parents sought to establish a school entirely with their own private funds.

And then the municipality, via its legal department, shut the school down.

One day before the start of the 2025 school year, the school was taken to court by the municipality’s Planning and Building committee which issued an injunction to halt all works.

120 children were left without a school on September 1, 2025.

No one in the municipality seemed to care.

The only thing that appeared to bother them were the protests of the children who had no school in which to learn.

Further work was done by the school. In December 2025 the Planning and Building Committee, which gathered all the relevant professionals, approved the school building.

Then, this January 2026, the school received a closure order.

The municipality requested enforcement measures from the Ministry of Education, and despite all the hard work of the entire school community, after parents and educators had worked tirelessly to build a school in high demand, investing their hard-earned money, time, and commitment, the school was abruptly declared unacceptable.

Why did this happen? Officials claim it was because parents were temporarily teaching their children in a building “without a permit” while awaiting the opening of the approved school facility.

But this explanation ignores the root cause.

The children were learning in temporary spaces precisely because the municipality refused to allow them into the permanent school building, a building that was ready, fully funded, privately leased, and renovated by the parents at no cost to the city.

And most disturbingly, at the very same time, the municipality refused to provide any temporary alternative for the children while they prevented their actual school building from opening.

This is the same municipality that is widely understood to routinely overlook other schools in the city operating without full permits in its city, but in this instance with Chabad, there is zero flexibility, zero compromise.

In short: the municipality created the problem, refused to fix it in any way, and then pointed the finger at the very families who are trying to solve it.

These families have been left with no way out. They are trapped between municipal obstruction of their school and the urgent and basic responsibility to secure an education for their children, a need the municipality continues to deny.

For six months since September 1, 2025 when the municipality seemed to actively work to obstruct the opening of the school through excuses and legalities, no representative of the city contacted the children or their families, or enquired as to their welfare.

There was No welfare check. No interim solution. No dialogue.

Where is Raanana’s leadership? Where is the council who is meant to be protecting and promoting the interests of the residents of its city?

Due to a lack of response, parents themselves offered multiple temporary solutions to the municipality, all were rejected, without reasonable explanation.

The municipality came up with zero alternative options of its own.

Not one viable alternative was offered for these children for an entire 6 months.

Then, only after a letter from Member of Knesset Zvi Sukkot this week (see attached) did the municipality finally wake up and act, half a year too late, not to solve the problem, but to forcefully reassign the children.

To where? To overcrowded schools that they themselves have officially and repeatedly admitted have no capacity.

This “solution” exposes a municipality that resolves problems not by solving them, but by running over those who stand in the way, overriding families rather than serving them, treating real people and children as numbers and as obstacles instead of constituents.

This “solution” is not only impractical, it is unlawful.

Section 10 of the Compulsory Education Law (1949) explicitly guarantees every parent the right to choose the educational stream in which their child will study. This is not a discretionary privilege; it is a fundamental legal right.

Furthermore, the State Education Law (1953) places a clear obligation on local authorities to ensure access to an educational framework that corresponds to the stream chosen by parents.

By attempting to force Chabad children into standard state-religious schools, frameworks that differ fundamentally in educational philosophy, religious approach, and community values, the municipality is directly violating parents’ rights under Israeli law.

This “solution” would separate siblings and break friendships and create huge logistical issues for all the families involved. But most severely the “solution” would force children into an education system that contradicts their values.

Ra’anana is meant to be a tolerant and inclusive city – isn’t that what is consistently spouted by the current leadership?

Yet somehow, when it comes to Chabad, every door is shut. Somehow in this instance no solution whatsoever can be found at all, ever.

What poor and lacking leadership we have in Ra’anana.

Let’s imagine for a moment if this issue was reversed. If 120 children who wanted a democratic school were forcefully reassigned to a religious school not of their choosing. There would be public outrage, demonstrations and one can only imagine the noise that would be made. But when Chabad children are forced into secular or non-Chabad frameworks, the city calls it “administration.”

Make no mistake.

This is not administration.

This is religious discrimination of the highest order.

The families affected who have been cast aside by the Ra’anana municipality are tax-paying and hard working parents of our city.

These 120 children who have been out of school for 6 months and who have been offered no real solution whatsoever despite their efforts are the children of Ra’anana.

They are all our children.

They deserve basic rights: education, equality, and respect.

Their children deserve the right to an education.

For six months they have been ignored. Their rights have been treated as optional.

The residents of Ra’anana did not elect the council for their political biases. They elected them to serve the city to the best of their ability.

The municipality is failing its children.

What conclusion can be drawn from the story of the Chabad school to date, and from Ra’anana’s approach to religious education, where not a single new religious school has been built in over 30 years despite repeated and growing demand?

In my opinion, the message is unmistakable. Ra’anana has become a city that systematically fails to serve its own religious population.

Now the question is simple:

Will the municipality step up and stop this discriminatory management?

Or will they continue to deny 120 children their basic right to education?

Time will tell.