The Plight of the Haredim

By far, the best article on this subject I have seen. Sympathetic, but not apologetic, and extremely well researched and understanding. From Azure:

In Israel, however, a different model has emerged, according to which a far greater portion of working-age haredi men are engaged in full-time study--as many as two-thirds, according to one survey.¹² Following the rise of Nazism and the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, a large number of Orthodox Jews came to Israel, including many rabbinical students and rabbis eager to rebuild the world of the yeshivot that had been lost. The most notable of these was R. Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, better known as the Hazon Ish, who arrived in Palestine in 1933 and was the foremost leader of the haredi community in Israel until his death in 1953; Karelitz led an effort to recast Orthodox life in a way that focused on stringency in observance of Jewish law, isolationism, and, above all, Tora study.¹³ While many similarly minded rabbis immigrated to the United States as well during this period (most notably R. Aharon Kotler, founder of the Lakewood yeshiva in New Jersey), their influence was far more decisive in Israel. One reason was the difference in size: By the end of World War II, the haredi community in the United States was already well-established and institutionally organized; the community in Palestine, on the other hand, was tiny, numbering only a few thousand, and disorganized, giving the immigrant rabbis far greater say in shaping its ideological tenor.

Another difference stemmed from the powerful Zionist ideals that defined the identity of secular Israel. From before the founding of the state, the haredi community has been locked in an ideological battle with Zionism, which its early leaders saw as a direct threat to the haredi way of life. Ya’akov Weinrot, one of Israel’s leading attorneys, who served as one of the Orthodox representatives on the Tal Commission, minces no words in articulating this view of Zionism. “Zionism was never content with gaining national independence,” he writes in his addendum to the commission’s report. “The mainstream expressed a desire to create a new culture, a new identity, of which a central tenet was the need to wipe out Orthodoxy as a precondition to opening new vistas.”¹⁴

This Zionist “threat” was greatest in the early years of the state, when Israel’s small haredi community, ravaged by the Holocaust and competing for the future of its children against the compelling image of the “new Jew” offered by Zionism, saw itself as struggling for survival. R. Binyamin Secharansky, director of the Beit Ya’akov girls’ seminaries in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, recalls the spiritual climate in Israel in the early 1950s: “The haredi public in those days suffered doubly: The great centers of Tora and Hasidism of Europe… had gone up in flames, and those who survived had to rebuild from scratch; moreover, the young state had new ideals and launched new symbols and flags to obscure their uniqueness as Jews.… The image of the tanned sabra, smiling confidently and speaking and acting brashly, whose whole being said youth and strength-this was the image that symbolized the new identity.”¹⁵ Jonathan Rosenblum, a well-known haredi columnist for The Jerusalem Post, describes the sentiment shared by secular and Orthodox Jews alike in the early days of the state: “In the early 1950s, there existed a virtual consensus concerning the future of the haredi community in Israel: Except for a few pockets of the old yishuv in Jerusalem, haredi Judaism would be a historical memory within one generation…. Even within the citadel of the old yishuv in Me’a She’arim, there was not a house in which someone had not been swept up by the Zionist movement, which was viewed as the vanguard of the future.”¹⁶

Nowhere was the threat felt more acutely than with respect to compulsory military service. According to the dominant Zionist vision, the army was meant not only to defend the state against foreign aggression, but also to serve as a central tool in forging a new national identity, through which immigrants from disparate lands would shed their cultural and linguistic baggage and adopt the language and customs of the new Jewish state. This was precisely what the haredi public did not want-and, for the most part, still does not want. Then as now, many haredi parents saw conscription as an attempt by the state to strip their children of the standards of behavior they had worked for years to inculcate. Retired Supreme Court Justice Tzvi Tal, who headed the commission that bears his name, says the haredim “do not want any contact between the yeshiva world and the dangerous-from the religious point of view-army, where people have different values relating to modesty and profane language.”¹⁷ The Post’s Rosenblum concurs: “After guarding their children’s souls like a Ming vase for eighteen years, haredi parents cannot be expected to expose them, at the most vulnerable stage in their lives, to an environment of casual sexual mixing and standards of modesty so at odds with their own.”¹⁸ A Gerrer Hasid who did four months of army service before joining the workforce relates that while he had no difficulty with the physical demands of basic training, he was shocked by the late-night discussions, which focused on women, movies, and sex. “Under no circumstances would I expose my son to a world” like the one he found in the IDF, he says. “I can’t send my son to be under the supervision of [then Defense Minister] Ehud Barak or [IDF Chief of Staff] Shaul Mofaz. Barak doesn’t live my experience and doesn’t know what’s important to me.”¹⁹

In the early days of the state, a settlement was reached between David Ben-Gurion and the leadership of the haredi community, according to which yeshiva students would be exempt from army duty so long as they were engaged in full-time study. Students who declared that “their Tora is their trade” (toratam umnutam) could continue to defer their enlistment indefinitely, but would be prohibited from engaging in activities other than Tora study-including teaching or even volunteer work--without first serving in the army.

Over the years, as the haredi community increased in size and the ideal of full-time Tora study for as long as possible became increasingly accepted, the number of people taking advantage of the deferments rose dramatically. What began as a group of approximately 400 students exempt from army duty at the founding of the state had grown by 1980 to around 10,000, and by 1999 had blossomed into a corps of over 30,000 men who were exempt from service, a number that continues to grow by about one thousand each year.²⁰ These men, dedicated to full-time Tora study, are also bound to it by the threat of immediate conscription should they attempt to enter the workforce. This fact alone constitutes one of the most significant differences between the American and Israeli communities: While an American haredi youth is free to pursue college or vocational training without the worry of being drafted, his Israeli counterpart must remain in yeshiva or face months or years in an army environment that is, in his view, hostile to his way of life. The threat of army service, in the words of Justice Tal, “imprisons” haredim in their yeshivot.²¹

Driven both by ideology and by the fear of army service, the haredi community that has emerged in Israel is characterized by a far more decisive commitment to full-time study of Tora than its American counterpart. According to a study by Boston University economist Eli Berman, 77 percent of haredi men between the ages of 25 and 29 in Israel are studying full-time in yeshiva; even for men aged 41 to 44, this figure remains as high as 46 percent.²² Overall, about two-thirds of working-age haredi men in Israel are full-time yeshiva students.²³

The exclusive nature of the ideal of Tora study is felt especially strongly among those haredim who end up pursuing careers outside the yeshiva. “Every father wants his son to grow up and become a great Tora scholar,” notes Moti Green, who left the yeshiva at 34 to become the first haredi attorney to clerk in the Israeli Supreme Court. “Even though I’ve succeeded as a lawyer, I’ve failed in terms of my ultimate goals in Tora.” Reflecting the extent to which the haredi world has succeeded in driving home the message of “Tora learning for all,” Green concludes: “This is my tragedy… to go from a spiritual life to a life of work is a giant waste.”²⁴

This attitude is reflected in the haredi educational system in Israel, which prepares young men for a life of Tora study, with a far smaller emphasis on vocational training. From the age of three, when boys are sent to heder to taste cakes baked in the shape of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and coated with honey to symbolize the sweetness of Tora, until 13, when they graduate from talmud tora (which parallels elementary and middle school), study of subjects such as English, math, and science is a barely tolerated necessity. “I was 12 the last time I had secular studies, and that was for 45 minutes a day,” recalls Yisrael. “We used to say, ‘What do we need this for? Are we going to be grocery store owners? We’re going to be Tora scholars!’”²⁵ Yeshiva ketana, the haredi equivalent of high school, offers no secular studies whatsoever; boys as young as 14 are expected to study Talmud ten hours or more a day.²⁶ Students move on at age 17 or 18 to yeshiva gevoha, the equivalent of talmudic college, and then, after marriage at 20 or 21, to kollel, where they continue as long as possible; for some it is a lifetime, for many others it is until their early forties and beyond.

Most girls attend Beit Ya’akov schools, where they are taught that nothing is more important than the study of Tora, and that marrying and supporting a scholar-in-the-making is the most noble mission of all-even if it means a life of poverty.²⁷ The success of the Beit Ya’akov system in inculcating this message is largely responsible for the phenomenal growth of the yeshivot. Some sixty years ago in Europe, R. Haim Ozer Grodzinski, one of the leading figures of Orthodox Jewry through the start of World War II, remarked that whenever he saw an unattractive or disabled girl, he would stand in her honor, “for she is likely to become the wife of a Tora scholar.”²⁸ In those days, most of the women who would consider marrying yeshiva students were those with no other option. Today, in the words of a psychologist in Jerusalem who works with haredi women, “Grade A marries Grade A”--the top girls want the top boys, which means someone who will sit and learn for many years.²⁹ Some 30,000 young women attend Beit Ya’akov high school and seminary, a six-year program that offers job training, mostly as teachers, and imparts a reverence for Tora and those who study it.

The rabbis who crafted this model were not under the illusion that every man is cut out for a lifetime of learning, or that every woman can bear and raise an average of seven or eight children while being the sole breadwinner in her family. But they nonetheless encouraged young men who had little chance of becoming serious Tora scholars to pursue an education that left them few opportunities to succeed in anything else, because this approach was seen as the only way to rebuild the Tora world after the devastation of the Holocaust. Only by creating a single track, it was believed, would the exceptional scholars remain in yeshiva long enough to realize their potential. And only by demanding compliance with a rigid model of what a Jew should be could the less-than-stellar scholar be protected from the lures of secular society.

The result of all this is a pattern of haredi life in Israel that differs markedly from the way religious Jews have ever lived, both in Europe before the war and in America today. As Justice Tal points out, even the great yeshivot of Lithuania never had more than a few hundred students--as compared to the nearly 4,000 students who are now learning at the Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem or the 1,500 at the Ponavez yeshiva in Bnei Brak. “This is how it always was,” Tal says. “There was never a situation when a boy learned his whole life. Even Volozhin, the flagship of the yeshiva world, only had four hundred students at its peak…. The situation in Israel is an anomaly.”³⁰

In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that the Israeli model cannot sustain itself indefinitely. The foremost problem is economic, resulting from the rapid growth in the size of the learning community. In the past two decades, as the ideology of lifelong, full-time Tora study has taken a firmer hold, the percentage of haredi men over the age of 25 choosing to study in kollel rather than earn a living has increased dramatically-from 41 percent in 1980 to 60 percent in 1996, according to one study.³¹ At the same time, haredi families are growing larger, and therefore the financial burdens are increasing: In 1980, the average haredi woman would bear 6.5 children in her lifetime; by 1995 that number had risen to 7.6, a 17-percent increase. This means that the number of children growing up in conditions of poverty-and the corresponding economic burden on Israeli society-is far higher than in the past. According to Berman, the portion of Israeli children overall whose fathers are studying in yeshiva full-time has more than doubled, from 2.7 percent in 1980 to 5.9 percent in 1996; according to one estimate, that number could exceed 10 percent by the year 2006.³²

These families tend to live in conditions of significant poverty and significant dependence. According to Berman, the average haredi family in which the father does not work has a total annual income of about $14,000, less than half that of the average two-parent family in Israel, while supporting 4.5 children, as opposed to the nationwide average of 2.1.³³ Of this income, only 18 percent is earned, almost entirely from the wife’s efforts, while the rest comes from a variety of government stipends and transfer payments. As a result, Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, cities with large haredi populations, consistently top the poverty figures released each year by the National Insurance Institute.³⁴ According to a recent study by the economist Momi Dahan of the Bank of Israel, over 50 percent of haredi families in Jerusalem lived below the poverty line in 1995.³⁵

there is much much more...