Israel's ultra-Orthodox community can no longer avoid the hard conversations - opinion

Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) made up roughly 2% of Israel’s population 60 years ago. Today, that number is around 13%, and demographers expect it to climb toward 20%, and even 30% within a generation or two. Growth on this scale changes what a community owes the country it lives in.

The haredi community can no longer function as a small group on the margins while others carry the weight of the economy, the army, and civic life. We are becoming a central pillar of this country, and pillars have to hold weight, not just take up space.

Parnassah (livelihood) has turned into something closer to a daily emergency for enormous numbers of haredi families, and I say that from watching it happen to people I know, including myself. Families are large, expenses grow faster than income, and parents find themselves colliding with a reality they were never given the tools to handle. 

Our schools do extraordinary work building the spiritual and intellectual life of our children, but somewhere along the way we stopped teaching baseline skills such as arithmetic, English, and skills that any adult needs to earn a living in a modern economy.

Furthermore, about half of haredi students who eventually try to catch up through post-secondary study drop out, because they’re starting from too far behind. That’s a structural failure we built ourselves, and we can unbuild it without touching the yeshiva system meant for those who are meant to sit and study full time.

In my own city, Beit Shemesh, serious plans were underway to build a vocational training complex in the heart of the city, close enough that residents in a community soon approaching half a million people could reach it by bus or on foot and walk away with a trade.

Due to fear of militant elements in the community declaring war on that project, it has stalled. Sadly, this is not an isolated story, but happens across haredi cities whenever anyone tries to build a real path toward employment.

This is an act of harm against thousands of families, dressed up as a defense of Torah values. Torah values include the responsibility to support one’s household. Hazal, our great sages, never envisioned a community where the majority of people live from hand to mouth.

Political leadership bears direct responsibility for where we’ve landed. There is a sitting party leader who has spent the past year traveling the country, threatening institutions that try to switch educational networks to a state haredi system that includes more comprehensive studies in English and math, and this leader told administrators things like, “I’ll come to your house, and I’ll drop a torpedo on it,” and other more graphic language that I won’t share. This is bullying, and it has nothing to do with protecting Torah study.

There are currently 18 haredi Knesset members sitting in the government, and whatever leaves their mouths in public, their operating goal has been singular: make sure no haredi ever serves in the IDF. Everything else is theater.

Haredi hesder yeshivot combine Torah study, IDF service

Since October 7, the army has needed thousands more combat soldiers and thousands more in support roles, and the haredi community is one of the most available sources of manpower in the country. Fourteen haredi hesder yeshivot already exist, some for over a decade, combining serious Torah learning with military service, preserving kashrut, prayer, and ongoing Torah study for soldiers who serve.

These programs work. And yet they get little to no government funding, no institutional recognition, and are treated with open contempt by the same politicians who claim to speak for the haredi public.

When soldiers from our own community went through combat courses, the people who should have stood up publicly to thank them, to embrace them, men like haredi party leaders Yitzhak Goldknopf, Arye Deri, and Moshe Gafni, said nothing. 

Worse, our young men who serve report being ignored, mocked, and undermined by the same leadership that benefits politically from claiming to represent all haredim. If those hesder frameworks were properly funded and expanded, we would not be talking about a few hundred participants. We would likely see thousands, and much of the manufactured tension around this issue would fade, because a respected pathway would finally exist for the many young men for whom full-time study was never realistic in the first place.

Ask any of these politicians what they’ve done to solve any of this, and the honest answer, spoken quietly by people close to them, is nothing. When pressed, the answer is always “yes, of course, someone should serve,” delivered in the exact tone people use when they mean the opposite.

Campaigns repeat the line while doing nothing to build it. That gap between what’s said and what’s done is the actual scandal here, more than any individual policy failure.

None of what I’m describing is really about economics or the army as separate issues. It’s about whether haredi leadership is willing to take ownership of the future it keeps promising to protect, instead of hiding behind slogans while institutions collapse and families quietly drown.

The haredi community has the numbers, the talent, and the values to lift this country into a new and bright future; we cannot be the ones to drag it down. What’s missing is leadership honest enough to admit where it has failed, and willing to build something better for the children, the community, and the country we all share.

The writer is chairman of the Haredi Public Party, a new political home for haredim who believe that protecting the world of Torah requires responsible leadership and practical solutions to the challenges facing our community. The party stands for genuine Torah study, increased educational options, dignified employment, appropriate military or national service, economic self-reliance, and a stronger partnership between the haredi community and all of the people of Israel.