(JNS) Pedagogues, politicians and policy experts gathered for a conference at Jerusalem’s Mamilla Hotel recently to counter an Israeli education crisis, in which Jewish studies have vanished from the curriculum, leaving millions of students ignorant of the whys and wherefores of their existence in the Land of Israel.

One of the most passionate participants, Smadar Moers, principal of the Nofim School in Tel Aviv, an elementary and middle school serving children ages 6 to 12, warned that the trend was “no less than an immediate strategic threat to the State of Israel.”

Zionist and nationalist values had been erased from the curriculum, Moers said.

“This is a burning issue. We need to raise a big red flag. In ‘X’ number of years, these students will become the country’s leaders and officials. The ramifications are readily apparent,” she said.

When Moers refers to state schools, she’s speaking of state-secular schools. The Israeli school system has four tracks, including state-run religious schools, which cater to Orthodox students. The situation isn’t as dire in those schools, she said, but “progressivism is penetrating there, too.”

About 30 people participated in the roundtable discussion, part of a larger conference and launch event of the Yachin Center on March 25.

Oren Henig, Yachin’s director, told JNS that the new center will serve as a research institute for national strategic studies, focusing on the fields of education and the judiciary.

“What characterizes the institute is the combination of academic and professional knowledge, and ties to Knesset members and civil society organizations. The institute is designed to promote the Jewish and national identity of the State of Israel,” he said.

‘They learn nothing about Judaism’

Moers told JNS, “It’s not just that the studies of Judaism, identity and Jewish roots are being pushed to the sidelines. It’s not just that today we study a third of the chapters of the Bible, for example, in the hours given over to Bible study compared to when the state was established, but it’s that progressive content is being introduced in its stead.”

A school principal for 13 years, Moers said she sees what’s happening on the ground. “It’s human rights, pluralism, oppression, Marxism and Bolshevism. It’s full-on woke,” she said.

“They learn nothing about Judaism, not even the holiday stories,” she said, noting that another educator at the conference wasn’t exaggerating when he said that if Israeli students saw Michelangelo’s statue of David, they wouldn’t know whom the sculpture represented.

Moers described the emptying of Jewish content and its replacement with radical leftism as a process that occurred gradually, imperceptibly. “It’s like smoke that comes under the door and spreads to every corner. You don’t feel it as it slowly chokes you,” she said.

Driving the change are progressive NGOs in Israel, many of which receive money from foreign funds with anti-Jewish and anti-Israel agendas.

There are also homegrown radicals, she added, Israelis who believe that the current government is a dictatorship and the army is murdering children in Gaza, and urge their students to take to the streets. They have no compunction about injecting politics into the classroom.

Another problem is the education portal of the Ministry of Education, called Gefen. “The Gefen system is not good,” Moers said. It offers some 30,000 programs of all kinds that teachers can use, but not all are approved by the ministry. Many educators don’t realize there are programs with agendas funded by foreign groups.

To start to rectify the situation, Education Minister Yoav Kisch instituted in November a requirement of two hours of Torah study every week for state-secular schools.

Moers said it’s not enough. There is also the problem of whether the schools properly implement the guidelines, pointing to slack oversight. There’s also a severe shortage of Bible study teachers. And there are school principals who share the progressive worldview, and who insert “human and social studies” in place of Bible studies, she said.

Although Moers has the power to ensure that the Bible, Jewish tradition and Jewish history are taught at her school, she rejected the suggestion voiced by some at the Yachin conference that decentralization is the answer, i.e., decisions related to the curriculum devolve to the local level.

“I’m against it. This is the opposite of nationalism. Because now they have decentralized, and every principal does what he or she wants. It becomes the Tower of Babel, each one with different plans,” she said.

“The sovereign is the people. The people democratically elected the government. It chose a nationalist government, and that government has to govern,” she said.

Moers said the most important thing is for someone to take the wheel and to declare a return to fundamentals. There is only one Jewish state in the world and the educational system should reflect that, to ensure Jewish identity isn’t erased.

“It all starts with the point of view. As soon as someone announces that we are going back to study Zionism, Judaism, nationalism, that this is the main goal, the necessary structural changes will fall into place,” she said.

Moers and her colleagues at the conference face an uphill task. Calls for more Bible study have been met with cries of “religification” by their opponents, a theme often picked up by Israel’s mainstream media.

“It’s a lie. They want to stop any threat that would block their progressive ideas. They want to yank out all nationalist sentiment,” Moers said. “They want to dismantle and destroy the so-called Old World down to the ground. That’s their motto.”