Israeli kindergartners and primary school students are on vacation during July and August. High school students begin their summer vacation on June 20. The controversy over this discrepancy is rather old: At the beginning of the 20th century, Yehudah Antebi, one of the first teachers in the Galilee and a principal of a school in the town of Safed, asked the Rothschild family, which financed the Jewish settlement there, to change the summer vacation so that farmers’ children would be able to help with the harvest. If the long summer break didn’t meet the demands of agriculture, Antebi feared, many parents would force their children to give up their schooling, because the harvest waits for no man. The chair of the Department of Education Policy and Administration at the School of Education at Tel Aviv University, professor Izhar Oplatka, related this anecdote to Al-Monitor. “Don’t think this is a new issue,” he said with a smile.
Since the Israeli school year follows the Gregorian and not the Jewish calendar, this year the autumn Jewish holidays fell in September. Parents exhausted from their children’s two-month summer vacation had to deal with about another month off of school. It isn’t easy to find day camps or child care over the holiday breaks, when working parents might not have any vacation days to take.
