Jaffa School Board

The first private (and coeducational) Hebrew-language modern school in Jaffa was founded in 1889 by Israel Belkind (1861–1929), a First Aliyah activist, pedagogue, writer, historian, and founder of the BILU colonization movement. In 1892, Belkind’s school closed due to financial reasons, but soon after that, two new schools—for boys (1892) and for girls (1893)—were established. The Ḥovevei Tsiyon organization and the Alliance Israélite Universelle funded and managed the schools together. The Ashkenazic “Old Yishuv” regarded both educational institutions as threats to Jewish religion; Jerusalem Orthodox rabbis opposed the nationalist-secular tendencies, especially at the girls’ school. In the girls’ school, the teaching was conducted entirely in Hebrew even though Alliance schools nearly exclusively used French as the language of instruction. The language issue led to a conflict between the pro-Hebrew Ḥovevei Tsiyon and the Alliance, the latter of which took sole control of the boys’ school in 1902. Despite identifying as Zionist secular schools, both included religious subjects in their curriculum, and for many years, the boys’ school began their day with prayer services.