Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly fond of cyberspace issues and even has a social-cyber vision. At a 2014 meeting with the heads of IBM on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, for example, he said the Israeli cyberindustry could be a catalyst for harnessing the potential of ultra-Orthodox society and integrating it into the high-tech industry and cyberindustry. Yet only a few days before Netanyahu and his wife set off last month for the 2018 summit in Davos, his government took another step toward perpetuating the ignorance and insularity of ultra-Orthodox society. This was when Education Minister Naftali Bennett signed a regulation enabling the state to fund unregulated ultra-Orthodox schools that teach Yiddish as a foreign language rather than English. Some 51,000 children attend those schools.
Yiddish, which was the lingua franca of millions of Jews in Eastern Europe for centuries, is a wonderful language well worth preserving. However, it is not particularly useful in the high-tech sector or in any other industry for that matter. Indeed, the hidden potential of Jewish ultra-Orthodox society cannot be overstated, but nor can the severity of the blow inflicted by policies such as Yiddish instruction on this potential and its damage to Israel’s strategic interests.
