Something appears to be shifting in Bet Shemesh, a city that has long served as a trendsetter for how the Haredi mainstream treats its more modern-leaning residents. According to testimony that reached Kikar HaShabbat, one of the city's leading Litvish rabbis has quietly instructed local seminary heads to accept graduates of the mamlachti Haredi school system, a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Bet Shemesh has always been something of a testing ground on this question. Longtime residents still remember the Tov movement, which set out to represent working Haredim, the so called blue shirts, and managed to win seats on the city council in both 2008 and 2013. Since then, Degel HaTorah, the Litvish party that has struggled to accept how quickly the modern-leaning community here has grown, has repeatedly clashed with that community, often over the schools their children attend.
Ramat Bet Shemesh Aleph was the first neighborhood where communities that don't see themselves as part of the Haredi mainstream really took root. Ramat Bet Shemesh Daled, which is growing fast, has since drawn in even more families who describe themselves as modern, and along with them the mamlachti Haredi school system, known as the mamach schools, has grown too.
For years, the instruction handed down to seminary principals in the city on this point was blunt and non negotiable, don't accept mamach graduates, including from the well known Netzach school, into Beit Yaakov seminaries. That line held even among the more modern leaning seminary administrators in the city. However modern a Beit Yaakov seminary might be, a graduate of Netzach or any other mamlachti Haredi institution was not getting in.
Now, according to what Kikar HaShabbat has learned, that line may have quietly moved. Sources say Yossi Goldring, who heads the city's education administration, has stated that Harav Elimelech Kornfeld, rabbi of Kehillat HaGra in Ramat Bet Shemesh Aleph, instructed seminary principals to accept Netzach graduates after the fact, provided the girls themselves are found to be a genuine fit for the seminary's atmosphere.
If accurate, this is not a small adjustment. It would upend a position that leading rabbis, especially over the past decade, have fought hard to defend. Just last year, on the sixth of Tammuz 5785, Harav Yitzchok Zilberstein, a member of Degel HaTorah's Council of Torah Sages, published a forceful letter urging parents to send their children to Chinuch Atzmai schools or even to the Shas affiliated Bnei Yosef network, anything other than a mamach school.
"Parents and educators from your illustrious city have approached me," Rav Zilberstein wrote at the time, describing efforts to open schools that call themselves Haredi without being under the supervision of the gedolei Torah. He closed with real warmth toward the parents he was addressing, writing that the Creator entrusted them with something precious, their children, and that he trusted them to raise those children for the honor of the Jewish people.
A year earlier, on the twelfth of Tammuz 5784, Rishon LeTzion Harav Dovid Yosef issued a similarly firm letter opposing the mamach schools. At the time still a member of Shas's Council of Torah Sages, he wrote that he was making his position unmistakably clear, that joining mamach institutions is absolutely forbidden, and that the community must do everything possible to strengthen pure chinuch through the Torah education network. He added that this had also been the view of Harav Shalom Cohen, the late head of Yeshivat Porat Yosef, as he had heard directly from him.
That same period, in early Tammuz 5784, Degel HaTorah held a gathering in memory of Harav Gershon Edelstein, against the backdrop of the controversy over Belz's education institutions joining the mamlachti Haredi system, an issue Rav Edelstein had fought hard against. Harav Dov Landau, who has continued in his predecessor's line, sent a letter to that gathering describing pure chinuch as something the gedolei hador had always guarded like a fortress wall against outside interference. He praised the heads of institutions who stood firm against the temptations of joining the mamach system despite mounting financial pressure, and recalled Rav Edelstein's steadfast opposition, even in his final days, to any talei bringing talmudei Torah under that framework. Rav Landau went further, writing that he had heard troubling reports that some wished to accept the Education Ministry's program, and called on anyone leaning toward it to reconsider, warning of the harm such a breach could cause the wider Haredi community.
Set against that history, Rav Kornfeld's reported instruction marks a real departure from the hard line rabbis in the city have held until now.
Senior educators in Bet Shemesh reacted to the reports attributed to Rav Kornfeld with some surprise, though everyone Kikar HaShabbat spoke with said the same thing, if this is the rabbi's position, they accept it without question. Kikar HaShabbat approached Rav Kornfeld directly for comment on the instruction attributed to him, but he firmly declined to address the matter.
The Bet Shemesh municipality said the main placement process for the year had already been completed back in Nissan, the earliest date anywhere in Israel, and added that the municipality does not comment on statements from internal discussions.
