Cultural Clash and Educational Diversity: Immigrant Teachers' Effort to Rescue the Education of Immigrant Children in Israel

Abstract

Thousands of immigrants that arrived from the former USSR during the last decade have drastically changed the Israeli educational system. However, constituting about 12% of the potential labor force of educators, immigrant teachers represent less than 5% of the actual teaching staff; 69% of immigrant students in the 17-age cohort do not possess a matriculation certificate. The paper presents the results of research, that studied probably the most prominent effort to rescue the education of immigrant children, namely - the Mofet system, which was founded by a group of immigrant teachers in 1991. Today's Mofet runs more than twenty supplementary evening schools around the country and five day-schools. The development of the Mofet group for the advancement of education is one of the most significant examples of the consolidation trends among the Russian-speaking intelligentsia in Israel. However, our argument is that though Mofet's success is directly linked to the general education system's failure to meet immigrants' needs, it doesn't express Russian immigrants' desire for socio-cultural segregation.

Keywords: Immigrant students, immigrant teachers, education in Israel