A study of the attitudes of the Jewish community towards an educational transition in a Jewish day school.

Carmel College, a Jewish Day School, was established to provide Jewish education for the children of the Durban Jewish community. Inasmuch as the school has always had a small contingent of non-Jewish students, a decision was made in 1994 to fill the school to capacity with non-Jewish students. Although, Carmel is in essence, a multi-cultural school in that it has a nearly fifty per cent non-Jewish population, implementing a multi-cultural education programme would be counter-productive to the goals of Jewish education. In that Orthodox Judaism is not assimilatory, it can be conjectured that Jewish education is incompatible with multi-cultural education. This study investigates the attitudes of the Jewish community towards the educational transition taking place in Carmel College, as a result of the change in the student population ratio. The study commenced with a generative phase which comprised of a review of relevant literature, document analysis, semi-structured interviews and a situational analysis. Issues that emerged from this phase of the research became the focus of further investigation using questionnaires. Findings have revealed the dilemma of managing a Jewish school in a multicultural environment. Whilst parents believe in the importance of Jewish