Parents from Kiryat Ono, a small city adjacent to Tel Aviv, hoped that this struggle was behind them. In 2017, just ahead of the start of the new school year, they fought to prevent young women from the religious Ma’ayanot Garin Torani from operating in their children’s schools, over concerns of desecularization. Ma’ayanot was established almost a decade ago by a group of settlers from Mitzpeh Jericho, under the leadership of Rabbi Yitzhak Sabato. In short, it was founded by people whose religious and often messianic worldview has very little in common with the secular, liberal residents of Kiryat Ono and their children.

This, for example, is what Sabato thinks about secular children, in his own words, from a Torah lesson he delivered in his yeshiva: “These children grow up without a clear identity; they grow up confused, they don’t know what is good and what is bad or the difference between right and wrong, what is permitted and what is forbidden.” Later in the same lesson, he says: “There are those who observe the Torah and the commandments and those who do not. One is good, the other is evil. We believe in our path and we do not believe in theirs. We are fighting against it.”

Rabbi Yaakov Naman, another Ma’ayanot activist, was documented boasting about the Garin’s achievements when it comes to religionization: “Two boys who came to study for bar mitzvah lessons five or six years ago are now going to [national-religious pre-military] academies; from families who were completely secular (…) everyone here needs to take a neighborhood (…) and without you these souls are extinguished, dead. And there are many neighborhoods like this in Israel. It's terrifying. Terrifying.”

Parents from Kiryat Ono were, indeed, terrified. Their battle was successful and schools in the city stopped inviting young women from Ma’ayanot to hold educational activities. Now, however, a Shomrim investigation reveals that the group, which was firmly escorted out of the front door, has returned via the window.

Young women with connections to the same Garin Torani, with the same agenda as Ma’ayanot, are now operating in these schools under a different name and within an apparently legitimate framework belonging to a body that is supported by the government of Israel and which is headed by the Education Ministry. The body in question runs national service programs for religious young women called Bat Ami. Of the 95 million shekels that Bat Ami was allocated in 2022, 72 million shekels were for “services to the state.”

“The girls from Bat Ami,” according to one parent who spoke to Shomrim, “belong to Ma’ayanot, just through various layers of camouflage. As far as I am concerned, Ma’ayanot is an extremist, messianic organization. The stated goals of its founders are to go into secular schools, to liberal cities, and encourage people to become more religious – as well as their vision of ‘the Greater Land of Israel.’ It’s happening in a lot of secular cities, but for some reason, Kiryat Ono has become the jewel in the crown of this project. They went into every school like wolves in sheep’s clothing; it’s desecularization in the guise of culture; religionization in the guise of pluralism – and it’s all wrapped up in this covering of cotton candy.”

“The problem is that it is a movement which has the goal of destroying the country and establishing a Halacha state in its place,” another parent says. “It is against the integration of women in the IDF, anti-LGBTQ and is waging a war against secular culture. These are the spiritual leaders of these girls and they send them to secular schools. My secular worldview means that I cannot accept a situation in which they are the role models for the children they come into contact with – in a disproportionate manner. It would be different if they only came to the school once or twice a year, but they are there all the time. They have their own spot in the teachers’ room, they are present in the school every day – teaching classes, chaperoning field trips – and they belong to an organization that espouses an ideology that is antithetical to everything that the state-secular education system teaches.”

“They do it in a very sophisticated manner and we are very naïve in this context,” says another parent, explaining how the system works. “It’s a sort of gray area. For example, the girls from national service teach about the Jewish holidays. But there’s teaching about what is written in the Haggadah about the exodus from Egypt, the popular folktale, and the traditional Jewish stories that are not religious. And then there’s just saying God, God, praise the lord. In the end, it’s a very fine line. Or there will be a ‘spontaneous’ prayer in class or a ‘surprise’ afternoon activity with the national service girls, whom the children already know from the classroom. Next to the school, there will be a station for boys to wrap tefillin and ‘just by chance,’ there will be a sign offering candies for anyone who does. In the end, there is an issue that all of the cities in Israel that call themselves secular and liberal are experiencing messianic Garinim Torani’im infiltrating their schools and trying to turn their children religious. And we are funding it all.”

“The problem is that it is a movement which has the goal of destroying the country and establishing a Halacha state in its place,” parent says. “It is against the integration of women in the IDF, anti-LGBTQ and is waging a war against secular culture."

‘Come and start living. We are Ma’ayanot!!’

The parents’ concerns are not just theoretical. A Shomrim investigation reveals that, using an operative plan that appears to be a system used not only in Kiryat Ono, Garinim Torani’im are setting up shop in the heart of secular cities and sending the young women from national service into secular schools through various intermediary associations. There is plenty of evidence linking many of these organizations.

Here are some examples of the link between Bat Ami and the Ma’ayanot Garin Torani in Kiryat Ono. The connection starts on the Bat Ami website. On the page dedicated to “The Kiryat Ono Garin – Bat Ami,” the young women in national service describe themselves as belonging to Ma’ayanot. A video from last year that they posted on the same page, under the title “Special Forces video clip – Ma’ayanot Garin Kiryat Ono,” leaves no room for doubt: “This is the Kiryat Ono Garin. Come here and start living. We are called Ma’ayanot!! Spreading Judaism and bringing people closer. Middle school, elementary school… and, of course, identity. Call Chen, she always answers.”

Chen, who “always answers,” is Chen Ben Shalom. Her phone number, according to the Bat Ami website, is the same number that appears on the Keren Kehilot website’s entry for the Kiryat Ono Garin Torani, where families are invited to join the group in the city.

Coincidence? In a recording of a conversation obtained by Shomrim, Ben Shalom confirms that they operate as part of Ma’ayanot. “I am the coordinator for the Bat Ami NGO,” she explains. “Bat Ami is the organization that operates the national service for girls. It is responsible for their accommodation, providing them with pocket money and things like that. The Garin is Garin Ma’ayanot. Bat Ami is not something different – it’s in addition. Every national service girl has an organization behind her; so, Bat Ami also operates its own national service girls, from Ma’ayanot.”

In the same conversation, she also explains that “a Garin Torani is a group of families that come to a city in order to forge connections between religious and secular people, especially in the Gush Dan region, and national service girls are in fact integrated into the Garin Torani with communal activities. That is one thing, from our perspective. My Garin is under the Garin Torani here in the city. There is a community and a framework here. And we are very active – we continue working with the children in the afternoon, too.”

According to Ben Shalom, the mornings are split up between activities provided by the Achy Association (the name comes from the Hebrew acronym for Israeli Social Solidarity), which runs 11 Garinim across the country, including in Kiryat Ono, where it has a permanent presence in middle and high schools or activities provided by the Zehut (Identity) organization, which operates in more than 1,300 schools and 135 local authorities across Israel, according to organization’s website. “Every national service girl has to do something in the morning and something with the Garin in the afternoon,” Ben Shalom said in the same conversation when asked about how the girls’ day is structured. In the morning, she said, “The girls go between elementary schools and teach classes that are linked to heritage, identity and Judaism.”

The connection, however, is not limited to the ideological realm. It is also evident elsewhere, in much more tangible examples. For example, the national service girls operate what they call “happening booths” in Kiryat Ono in the afternoon. A QR code placed at one of these booths asked for donations and, when people scanned the code, it led to the website of the Ma’ayanot Garin Torani.

Although Ben Shalom sounds full of confidence, it is clear that she is also speaking very carefully. She is well aware of the allegations of desecularization and even confirms that there are some activities that are designed to bring children closer to Judaism – but she insists that these activities focus on what she calls “bringing people closer together.”

That terminology is all too familiar to parents who spoke to Shomrim about the matter. “Bringing people closer together is a euphemistic term for turning them religious,” one of them says, adding that it is hard to recruit parents to the struggle when they take the phrase at face value. The most common response that he and other campaigners heard from parents was: “What’s wrong with a little Judaism?”

Bat Ami told Shomrim in response that, “Chen the coordinator is a part-time employee of Bat Ami, who is responsible on our behalf for the national service of girls during school activities. The other part of her job is working on behalf of a local association called Ma’ayanot.”

The statement from Bat Ami added that “national service girls who work in the Kiryat Ono Garin, like dozens of task forces across the country, work in the morning in schools under the define role and are allocated by the Education Ministry; and after the end of school studies, they continue to volunteer in the community until the evening, through local initiatives and organizations, as well as welfare clubs. Bat Ami is proud to accompany more than 3,500 volunteers – boys and girls – in national service every year, secular and religious alike, Jewish and Arab alike, in the peripheries and in the center of the country.”

“Bat Ami is the organization that operates the national service for girls. It is responsible for their accommodation, providing them with pocket money and things like that. The Garin is Garin Ma’ayanot. Bat Ami is not something different – it’s in addition.”

‘It would be very good to purify the national anthem’

Kiryat Ono, as already mentioned, is far from being alone. Garinim Torani’im left their original goal – infiltrating socioeconomically challenged communities in the peripheries and mixed Jewish-Arab towns in order to “strengthen” them – far behind. They are now also deployed in economically well-off cities which have a clearly liberal and secular character; places like Givatayim, Ramat Gan, Herzliya and Hod Hasharon. Moreover, even in cities that have already fought to get the Garinim Torani’im out of their schools, parents are finding that they are making a return thanks to the national service girls, who are allowed into schools since they ostensibly are not part of a Garin Torani.

In Ramat Gan, too, for example, Bat Ami is the association which operates the national service girls – under the name of “Banot Re’ut” – which is part of a Garin Torani that already operates in the city (“La’ir et Ha’ir,” or Bring Light to the City) and which received around 4 million shekels of government funding in 2023. According to the Garin’s website, it operates the Re’ut Center in Ramat Gan, “a religious college for national service girls who teach at schools in Ramat Gan.”

As is the case in Kiryat Ono, Zehut is also involved in providing the ideological framework for national service girls in Ramat Gan. This ideology is passed from the national service girls to the children they engage with in state-run schools. According to the Zehut website, the organization “represents 37 associations working under the supervision of the Torah Culture Department in the Ministry of Education.” The organization’s vision, according to the website, is “strengthening the solidarity and common interests between the different segments of the Jewish nation.” It works in cooperation with official national service organizations and openly sends its representatives into schools – notwithstanding the fact that the worldview of its leaders is unpalatable to parents from the secular and liberal camp.

Here, for example, is what it says about Israeli Independence Day on the website of the Jaffa Garin Torani, which was established by Rabbi Yuval Alpert, a member of Zehut’s executive board. “If you build the Land and settle it and call those who deal ‘a state,’ you must, in any case, be very wary that the leadership in the country will be conducted according to the Holy Torah. Instead of singing ‘Hatikvah,’ which declared that we want to be ‘a free people in our country’ – to be a people free of Torah and commandments, God forbid – it would be very good to purify the national anthem by changing these words: ‘The Land of Israel without Torah is like a body without a soul’.”

Yehoshua, whose son attends an elementary school in Ramat Gan, says that “last year, my son started first grade. Very early on in the school year, we realized that there was something called ‘Re’ut girls’ at school. They have been there for several years. We found out through the parents of older children and we noticed that there are indeed classes led by these national service girls, who ‘come to bring the light of Judaism to the school,’ as they call it and as appears on the Zehut website.”

Like in the case of Ma’ayanot, the blurring of connections when it comes to Re’ut is not sophisticated but does exist. “In their syllabus, first of all, it does not mention the Re’ut girls at all,” says Yehoshua. “It just says ‘On Tuesdays we study a variety of subjects’.” What are those subjects? According to Yehoshua, they are classes in various aspects of Judaism. “When the teacher updates the parents about what the children have studied, she does not write ‘Re’ut girl.’ Instead, she writes that, ‘this month we studied a range of interesting subjects’ It is clear that the Zehut organization and all its affiliates are aware that they have to operate quietly and that the more obvious they are the more opposition there will be.”

Recently, the intense activity by Yehoshua and other parents came to an unexpected end, following the struggle they launched before the outbreak of the war and which ended because of it. “The Re’ut girls made a mistake,” he explains. “In violation of the agreement with the school, they talked about the war and Zehut project called ‘Filling the space,’ which involves talking to the children about October 7 and telling them that there were many miracles that day, that all the soldiers are heroes and that what we need to do is adopt a fallen IDF soldier and do good deeds in his name. They distributed their flyers in class and showed a video that depicted October 7 as the act of a devil who came down from heaven; there was no political context because that is their agenda, and they talked about how many soldiers were killed and showed their photographs. Then those parents who preferred not to join the struggle were also up in arms. Within 24 hours, the school announced that the national service girls were out.”

“I am very familiar with the industry of returning people to religion in Israel and I know how to identify nuances,” Yehoshua says. “When they talk about ‘the light of Judaism,’ most parents think that it sounds somewhere between reasonable and harmless. In my case, all of the warning lights were flashing, because I know that it is always accompanied by homophobia and misogyny and efforts to change the children’s agenda and their parents’ lifestyles. If you know who to ask, it’s all out in the open. This is not some kind of conspiracy theory.”

‘An entire sector gets free workers from the state’

There are currently 135 Garinim Torani’im in Israel, according to Dr. Yael Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, who researches the subject. According to a report in Calcalist, the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions, under the leadership of Religious Zionism MK Orit Struck, received 86 requests for support last year, compared to 66 Garinim Torani’im that submitted requests in 2022. Struk’s ministry is also responsible for the Authority for National-Civic Service, which received an annual budget of around 132 million shekels in 2023 and around 92 million shekels this year, according to data published by the Budget Key website.

Based on conversations with teachers and educators, it appears that the main motivation for bringing national service girls into the classroom is the severe shortage of manpower that the education system is experiencing. This means, according to experts involved in the field, that finding an alternative solution to the manpower shortage is one of the primary ways that the phenomenon can be curbed. “We do not want them defining our children’s identity; we’ll deal with their identity alone,” says Marina Shmueli, a mother and social activist from Ramat Gan, who was one of the co-founders of the City Alliance, which allows parents from different cities to engage with each other, especially on the issue of national service girls in their children’s schools.

Among the issues they discuss is finding alternative solutions for the school principals. For example, one mother from Ramat Gan says that she succeeded in getting the national service girls removed from her children’s school by suggesting that the principal use the services of a different organization, such as BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change, which advocates for “a Jewish-Israeli identity which is centered on the connection between culture, heritage and tradition and democratic values, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.”

Attorney Idan Lamdan, deputy mayor of Ramat Hasharon and a former social activist and city council member who dedicated much of his time to the matter, told Shomrim about the struggle he was part of. “We campaigned to get the national service girls out of the city, out of all the schools. We decided that any principal who says they have a problem or has a special need for these girls – in other words, that they solve a budgetary problem for the school – will get funding. So, when City Hall got on board, the national service girls were removed from all the schools and kindergartens in Ramat Hasharon.”

Attorney Itamar Kremer, who runs an association dedicated to ensuring that state-run schools are free from external interference, confirms that “the advantage of the national service girls is that they are cheap manpower, the cost of which is, in fact, paid in full by the state and not by the organization. And then these organizations, with their religious, nationalist and often extremist agenda are allowed into the Ministry of Education and its schools.

“What is happening today is that religious organizations are being given preferential treatment by the state, thanks to the fact that they cost less money. Secular organizations have to recruit expensive manpower and pay minimum wages to attract teachers who can spread a democratic and liberal ideology in schools. On the other hand, a national-religious organization that wants to spread a conservative, faith-based, traditional, religious ideology does not have to pay for that. The state simply provides them with national service girls. And this is discriminatory. There is an entire sector which benefits from unfair competition, because it gets its employees free from the state. What they did was to establish inherent discrimination in favor of religious organizations.”

Dor, a father and activist from Kiryat Ono who works as an analyst, decided to get into the weeds and explains how it all works. “There is a triangle between the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions, under which all of the national service organizations operate; the National Service Division at the Education Ministry; and the schools. The budgets and the funding come from Struk’s ministry, which is responsible for taking in all those in national-civic service and allocating them to all kinds of places, and the Education Ministry gets some proportion of the volunteers, before deciding what it will do with that number of people.

“The Ministry of Education’s regulations say that it is supposed to work differently, with volunteers sent to educational institutions according to a socioeconomic scale. For example, the peripheries and poorer communities are supposed to get volunteers; a school in an affluent socioeconomic region is not.

“What is happening in Kiryat Ono and, I assume, in other wealthy cities, is that for some reason the schools, which are in wealthy neighborhoods where the population is affluent and comes from a high socioeconomic grouping and are not supposed to get any national service volunteers – are getting lots of them.”

How does Dor know all this? Because he looked into it. “I went to the school principal and I said that she has volunteers from the national service program teaching lessons with exclusively Jewish content and efforts to bring the children closer to religion. As parents, I said, we want something else. If there are national service volunteers available, that’s great, but I want you to bring a much more diverse population, with more diverse content. Let’s try and take the volunteers from elsewhere; there are secular volunteers, Druze volunteers – there are even retired volunteers who used to be physics teachers.”

The principal agreed and told Dor to contact the Ministry of Education. He did so and asked how the school could go about replacing its volunteers. He was told that the principal should fill out an online form defining her school’s needs but when the form was sent to the principal and she tried to enter the number of volunteers required, the system told her that her school was not entitled to any volunteers.

Confused, Dor contacted the Ministry of Education and was told that he had nothing to worry about and that the volunteers would not be taken away from the school. That was the only explanation he received and, as a result, was not able to bring in replacement volunteers. “I told them that we don’t want volunteers from Garinim Torani’im, we want something different. Something that would enrich the children or enhance their core curriculum.A Ministry of Education official told me, ‘No, that’s impossible. This is the allocation and that’s that.’ And then I realized that the school is not actually entitled to any volunteers. So, it appears that we have an apparatus that funds national service volunteers in rich cities and insists that these volunteers come exclusively from Garinim Torani’im.”

The Ministry of Education submitted the following response: “The Ministry of Education vehemently rejects attempts to ascribe to the national service program extraneous motives. National service exists first and foremost to strengthen Israeli society and it is based on the values of mutual responsibility and communal activity. Schools operate with complete independence when it comes to choosing their national service volunteers, they conduct rigorous interviews, define their areas of activity and ensure that they are integrated into roles which advance educational, emotional and social well-being in predefined areas – irrespective of the religious or secular background of the students.”

The response went on to say that “the volunteers come from a wide range of associations, religious and secular alike, and are integrated out of a sense of commitment to the values of the educational system. National service is an important part of strengthening the educational system, the community and Israeli society.”

The Authority for National-Civic Service within the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions said that the responses submitted by the Ministry of Education and Bat Ami are sufficient.

Shomrim did not receive responses from Zehut, Kiryat Ono and Ramat Gan city councils or the Ma’ayanot and La’ir et Ha’ir Garinim Torani’im.