How the Sephardim Won Political Clout in Israel

  • (4 of 4)

    Despite such outbursts, time, assisted by hard work, has helped heal some of the divisions, and the conditions of the Sephardim have substantially improved. Although 90% of Israel's slum dwellers are still Sephardim, a $400 million program has rehabilitated 84 depressed neighborhoods, nearly all of them Sephardic. Although the Sephardim still constitute barely a fifth of the nation's undergraduates and around a tenth of its postgraduate students, they account for more than 60% of its elementary school pupils. Thanks to educational reforms, illiteracy has been slashed from nearly 13% in 1969 to 5%. Many Sephardim have also managed to pursue success without forfeiting their own heritage. Just last month, a formerly disaffected Sephardi publicly unveiled a labor of ethnic pride on which he and a team of neighborhood kids had been working for a year: a model of a Moroccan village.

    The Sephardim have also grown more vocal in demanding better social welfare programs, homes and jobs. Many of the early Sephardic settlers were superstitious to the point of fatalism. Their destinies, they held, would be determined not by their own efforts but by kismet, or fate. That self-fulfilling belief was only confirmed by the practices of a centralized government, which handed down its decisions in peremptory fashion from Jerusalem. "The more Sephardim shout, demonstrate, claim discrimination, demand better conditions, the healthier it is for us all," says Yair Levin, a Ministry of Education director. "It means they are taking the future into their own hands."

    Meanwhile, the growing presence of "Ashkesephards" (as the children of mixed marriages are jokingly called) bears witness to the gradual confluence of the groups. Already it is becoming difficult to distinguish between the two cultures, and today's young may not in any case care to do so. Most Israelis age 36 or younger have grown up under the same sun and in a climate where the historical hostilities of their forebears seem less and less relevant. "While other areas of our society are getting worse, the problem of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim is much less serious than it used to be," concludes Professor Amir. "Within the next generation, the ethnic problem will be of minor importance."

    — By Pico Iyer

    — Reported by Martin Levin/Jerusalem

    * "The Hebrew term once referred to Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin, but it later came to include non-European Jews.

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. 3
    4. 4
    5. Next Page