Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Single-Sex Education Soars 40% in Israel Religious Schools

Over the past 13 years there has been a 40 percent rise in the number of elementary-school students in Israel’s state religious system whose classes are segregated by gender.

The claim is made in a recent study by Ariel Finkelshtain, a researcher for Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah, an organization that describes itself as a religious-Zionist movement that seeks to promote the values of tolerance, equality and justice within Jewish religious society.

The study found a positive association between greater degrees of gender separation in these schools and higher socioeconomic levels among the students’ families.

In elementary schools in the state religious system in which no classes are separated by gender, 34.5 percent of the students on average come from lower-income families, compared to 25 percent in schools with some gender-segregated classes and just 9 percent in schools where all the classes were sex-segregated.

The study, which was based on data from an Education Ministry website, also found a greater ratio of boys to girls in schools with a policy of gender integration in its classes, and a corresponding smaller ratio in schools with more gender segregation.

For more, go to Haaretz

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.