Cultural clash and educational diversity: Immigrant teachers' efforts to rescue the education of immigrant children in Israel

Thousands of immigrants who arrived from the former USSR during the past decade have drastically changed the Israeli educational system. However, constituting about 12% of the potential labour force of educators, immigrant teachers represent less than 5% of the actual teaching staff; 69% of immigrant students in the 17-year-old age cohort do not possess a matriculation certificate. This article presents the results of research that studied probably the most prominent effort to rescue the education of immigrant children, namely the Mofet system, which was founded by a group of immigrant teachers in 1991. Today's Mofet runs more than 20 supplementary evening schools around the country and five day-schools. The development of the Mofet group for the advancement of education is one of the most significant examples of the consolidation trends among the Russian-speaking intelligentsia in Israel. However, the authors argue that though Mofet's success is directly linked to the general education system's failure to meet immigrants' needs, it does not express Russian immigrants' desire for socio-cultural segregation.