The Israel Defense Forces’ common Jewish conversion course was saved from closing down after a last-ditch answer was reached by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett to fund it Thursday night time.
Nativ, the one state-recognized conversion system within the nation not managed by the Chief Rabbinate, was set to shut its doorways on Friday over a finances shortfall of some NIS 20 million, leaving some 2,500 college students present process conversion, a lot of them troopers, in limbo.
According to the settlement reported by Hebrew-language media, the program will obtain NIS 5 million ($1.4 million) every from the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministries of finances, Diaspora affairs and protection.
The NIS 20 million in complete shall be sufficient to fund Nativ till the tip of 2018.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, proper, seen with Education Minister Naftali Bennett on the weekly cupboard assembly in Jerusalem on August 30, 2016. (Emil Salman/Pool)
Hundreds of troopers, most of them non-Jewish immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the previous Soviet Union, enter the army’s conversion system every year.
Thousands have efficiently completed the program and transformed to Judaism by way of the IDF’s rabbinic courtroom.
In a letter despatched to the PMO on Wednesday, the army-run conversion program warned of the looming shutdown, dispersal of the two,500 college students, and layoffs of some 180 academics.
The same finances dispute between Nativ and the PMO and Finance Ministry threatened to derail the program in 2015, and it was equally later resolved.
Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern — a founding father of the program throughout his navy profession — had earlier referred to as on the federal government to step in to bail out “one of the most important projects for the IDF as a people’s army.”
Stern stated that “as one of the cornerstones of conversion in Israel, the Nativ course has frequently proven itself more [effective] than the state conversion system.”
The first Nativ course opened in 2001.