Presents a brief overview of the development of Israel's heavy dependency on residential placement for child welfare. Recent trends reflect heavier reliance on community-based servcies for disadvantaged youth, but efforts to coordinate and improve such services are only beginning. (KH)

Examines the historical processes which led to the institutionalization of residential care for children in Israel. The utopian "children's villages" of the 1920's were eventually taken over by a process of mass institutionalization and bureaucratic inflexibility, but the ideological commitment to collective group care has remained…