The holiday of Passover is also known as the Festival of Freedom. The traditional Seder dinner sanctifies and glorifies the Jews’ exodus from Egypt as an escape from bondage into liberation. It’s a religious holiday with a positive universal message. You could say that the Passover Hagaddah text is an ancient edition of the story of the Holocaust and the revival of Jewish statehood, with the addition of miracles God did for our ancestors. 

The practical lessons that Israeli children — ultra-Orthodox, national-religious and secular — receive from the Israeli education system are as follows: The Jewish people has been the victim of persecution since time immemorial; the land of Israel was given to the people of Israel along with the Torah; there’s a god, and he chose us out of all the nations. It’s not customary to spoil such religious rites and national myths that pass down from generation to generation with ''heretical speculation'' — like the total absence of the exodus from Egypt — a major regional event — from Egyptian writings from the Pharaonic era. In addition, dozens of archaeological missions from all over the world have searched in vain for the presence of a multitude of people at Kadesh-Barnea, the place where, according to the biblical story, the people of Israel encamped on their way from Egypt to the land of Canaan. The problem is that these myths, the likes of which are common in all religions, have been translated in recent years into a political platform and have become a kind of legal deed of ownership. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pointed to the existence of ancient synagogues on the Golan Heights as “proof” that the Golan was and remains part of the land of Israel. The narrative of the exodus from Egypt contains even more ancient “proof” that the Jewish people obtained ownership of the land of Canaan so many generations ago. In this story, no other people have any right to any part of the Holy Land. The problem is especially serious when the Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the curricula, is in the hands of a religious politician from the radical right. It is even more serious when this politician, who has ambitions of leading the nation, builds political power by disseminating nationalist, fundamentalist sentiments. 

The minister of education and chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Naftali Bennett, makes sure to speak in one breath about the combination of instructing Jewish and Zionist values and instilling universal values (as he did in a speech on Feb. 29 at the first annual conference for policy-makers in the humanities, held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem). However, when Bennett speaks of Jewish values, he means the Orthodox Judaism from “his father’s home.” For instance, according to the new curriculum in “Israeli Jewish culture” for public schools that the minister presented last week, the main topic taught in the fifth grade will be “the attachment of the people and the land.” Students will learn about the Jewish prayer book and teachers will emphasize the fasts marking the destruction of the Jerusalem temples. Orthodox organizations, run by associates of HaBayit HaYehudi, received 95% of the budget allocated to support Jewish culture. Pluralistic organizations, like Zehut and Panim, which offer critical perspectives on Jewish history and secular Jewish culture, are left to gather up the crumbs and beg schools to let them in.