The Education Ministry told the High Court of Justice that it could not provide a court-ordered update to the High Court in the ongoing case over funding to ultra-Orthodox (haredi) school networks because the Finance Ministry had not provided the information it needed.
The filing, submitted on Thursday, did not directly address Justice Yael Willner’s question - why the ministry had not responded to inquiries from the Knesset legal adviser regarding the alleged practice of transferring funds before receiving approval from the Knesset Finance Committee - and instead said it could not do so without information held by the Finance Ministry.
The update highlights a breakdown in coordination within the state’s response to the case: The ministry responsible for education funding told the court it could not explain the transfer of funds without data controlled by another ministry.
According to the filing, the Education Ministry had contacted the Finance Ministry for the relevant material, but had not received all of the necessary data. Some information, it said, was incomplete, required additional processing, or remained accessible only through Finance Ministry systems.
The ministry’s response did not say when it expected to receive the missing information or when a full update would be filed.
The case is part of a broader legal battle over state funding to the two main party-affiliated haredi education networks: Ma’ayan Hahinuch Hatorani, affiliated with Shas, and the Independent Education Center, affiliated with United Torah Judaism. The networks educate tens of thousands of students and receive billions of shekels in public funding annually.
Petitioners, including Hiddush and opposition lawmakers, have argued that the state continues to fund the networks even though many of their schools do not meet basic academic requirements, including teaching the full core curriculum in subjects such as math, English, and science. They have also challenged the state’s oversight mechanism, arguing that monitoring is based largely on self-reporting and advance-coordinated inspections rather than real-time, school-by-school enforcement.
Court probes NIS 800m sent before approval
A separate but related part of the case concerns a December 2025 budget transfer of roughly NIS 800 million for education purposes, including funds directed to haredi educational institutions. At a January hearing, it emerged that most of the money had already been distributed before the Knesset Finance Committee voted on the transfer, prompting sharp criticism from the bench and an interim order freezing the remaining portion.
That remaining portion - about NIS 98 million - was sent back to the Finance Committee for renewed discussion after the High Court indicated that the original approval process lacked a sufficient factual basis and that committee members had not received the information needed to assess the transfer.
The Finance Committee ultimately approved the transfer on April 14, following a stormy debate in which opposition lawmakers pressed Education and Finance Ministry representatives over whether schools receiving the money were complying with core curriculum requirements, and whether deductions should have been made for schools that were not.
The Knesset Legal Department, filing on behalf of the committee, had previously told the court that the Finance Ministry acted unlawfully by advancing most of the money before receiving committee approval.
The latest filing does not resolve those claims. Instead, it places the immediate obstacle within the government itself - between the ministry asked to answer the court and the ministry holding the information needed to do so.