Recently, officials from Petah Tikva’s municipality have begun calling asylum seekers in the city demanding home visits, allegedly for the purpose of registering their children for educational institutions. Dozens of asylum seekers have already received such calls. In one case, an asylum seeker asked for the municipal representative to arrive on Friday as he and his wife work, and in response the representative told him that he inferred as a result that he did not live in the apartment. In another case, a representative called when he was at the apartment and demanded that he be let in.
The evidence brought to ACRI’s attention indicates that the representatives of the municipality did not make do with just a visit to the apartments, but even proceeded to photograph them. In one case, when the tenant tried to resist the photography, he was told that his refusal would cause his children not to be placed in the city's education system.
Today (20.8.2019), Attorney Tal Hassin of ACRI and Advocate Haran Reichman of the Clinic for Law and Educational Policy at Haifa University, appealed to the mayor of Petah Tikva, Rami Greenberg, demanding that city employees stop requiring asylum seekers to allow them to enter and photograph their apartments as a condition for enrolling their children in the city's educational institutions. They further demanded that the municipality send asylum seekers' children notifications regarding their placement in schools and kindergartens in the city by this week, in accordance with the Lod District Court's ruling from about a month ago on a petition ACRI filed.
"In-depth inspections of dozens of people, all of whom are unique in skin color and origin, through photographing their apartments allegedly as a registration condition, indicates that the municipality is attempting to harass asylum seekers living in the city, yet again, and prevent their children from entering educational institutions in an attempt to cause them to leave." The appeal reads, "This is what racism looks like."
ACRI and the Clinic's appeal to the Mayor of Petah Tikva (Hebrew), 20.8.2019