The court has issued an order to close the Beis Yaakov school located in the classrooms of Beit Sefer Safot vTarbuyot. Kikar is reporting this, and MK Lipman has confirmed it for me.
The Ministry of Education threatened to do so if Mayor Moshe Abutbol would ignore their warnings and move ahead with his plans to move the Beis Yaakov classes into the building anyway. Abutbol ignored the warnings, and now there is a tzav sgira against the school. The school has to be closed from these premises within 30 days.
The closure order is because the Ministry takes it very seriously that the local authority went just days before the opening of the school year and it took such a unilateral action that affects the relations between different sectors in Bet Shemesh.
According to the Ministry of Education, they have offered Abutbol, in the past, alternative solutions, an appropriate building. Abutbol denies it and says he was only offered more caravans, but with nowhere to put them,
Personally, I don't know why a decision affecting the relations between different sectors is an issue the Ministry of Education should care about. they should care about education, do kids have an appropriate place to learn, does one school have the right to take the resources of another, and other similar issues - but to close a school because of affecting the relations of sectors seems strange.
What concerns me more than this closure order though is that perhaps Abutbol has messed up Bet Shemesh for a long time to come. This was not reported in the news, but I heard it separately from different sources. It seems different Haredi MKs, including specifically Gafni and Deri, warned Abutbol not to take this step of moving the school in. It seems they have many issues on their plate and this would cause them too much of a headache. Abutbol went ahead anyway and made his move. Now, from what i am told, they are washing their hands of him and not willing to come to help him get out of the mess. They say he has caused them more trouble than he is worth.
So not only has Abutbol damaged his relations with the Ministry of Education, but it seems he has also lost his natural partners. Bet Shemesh might now be on its own...
and for him to do this now with the threat of a fight looming regarding splitting the city, is just irresponsible.
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