The Melting Pot in Israel: The Commission of Inquiry Concerning the Education of Immigrant Children during the Early Years of the State (review)

In January of 1950, the Israeli government, under pressure from the religious public, launched a Commission of Inquiry to investigate “educational matters in the immigrant camps.” The inquiry, which lasted three and a half months, set out to study the issue of anti-religious coercion in the camps, clarify accusations of such coercion that had been made in the press, and examine the sources of propaganda abroad that concerned these accusations.

This commission, chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Gad Frumkin, is the major focus of Zvi Zameret’s illuminating study. Within the context of this painstaking investigation, however, Zameret also provides a highly useful historical study of a host of issues involved with the immigration of Mizrachi Jews to Israel through the early 1950s, with a special focus on education and politics. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates how these events not only played a major role in Israeli political life of the era, but also how they contributed to more contemporary dynamics including alienation between secular and religious publics, and the rise of Shas as a political force.

Zameret sets out in great detail the forces that pressured Ben-Gurion into forming the Frumkin Commission, one of the first of its kind in Israel. These included growing alarm by the religious leadership of the Mizrachim within Israel at the stream of reports from immigrant camps detailing anti-religious educational activities as well as physical coercion such as the forcible cutting of boys’ payot. Additionally, foreign pressure was brought to bear, especially by American Orthodox Jews, who staged a mass protest in Manhattan in 1950, the largest Jewish demonstration in the United States since the founding of the State of Israel. While the Prime Minister supported the educational efforts of Labor-oriented teachers in the camps and believed that inevitably Oriental Jews in Israel would take on modern ways and a Zionist ideology, he also recognized that local and foreign religious populations needed to be mollified and so formed the commission of inquiry both to diffuse their concerns and out of personal concern regarding immigrant issues.

The commission’s conclusions, however, created political problems for Ben-Gurion. After 33 sessions in which it heard the testimonies of 101 witnesses, it issued its report. While denying that there was systematic anti-religious coercion across the immigrant camps, it found numerous instances of pressure. Further, it raised questions about the degree to which sensitivity was paid to immigrants’ religious needs, and about the viability of a single model of purely secular education. In the process, Zameret argues, the commission rejected the “melting pot” theory of immigrant socialization in favor of a more pluralistic societal model. These conclusions flew in the face of the ideology and social agenda of the Labor Zionists who controlled national politics.

Zameret judiciously assesses the commission’s operation and findings. He considers that the basic conclusions about anti-religious coercion in the camps, based on testimony and archival data, were well founded. However, he believes that the commission erred in “grading” the various political movements on the basis of the sensitivity of their education programs to immigrant traditions and rightly insists that it came up short in specifically blaming Nahum Levin, of the Culture Department, Y.A. Aldema, Cultural Coordinator at the Ein Shemer camp, and Z. Zahavi, instructor at the Beit Lid youth camp, especially given the commission’s failure to allow them to defend themselves. Most significantly, he faults the Frumkin Commission for its refusal to attach responsibility to those at higher political levels, especially Zalman Shazar, who was Minister of Education and Culture and a major Mapai political figure. Shazar, he argues, knew at least some of the particulars of the allegations, and was the person ultimately responsible for educational services in the camps. Despite...