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PDF FormatThe need to prepare people for work has a profound impact on the education of haredim in the United States. The assumption that students will go on to gainful employment means that schools must conform to the rudimentary demands of a modern economy: The American yeshiva high-school student studies an array of secular studies, including math and English, and graduates high school with a recognized diploma. In most haredi communities in the United States, it is acceptable for a yeshiva student to attend college at night and earn a degree in fields such as accounting or computers, or even to go on to graduate school in practical subjects like social work, business, or education.9 Even those yeshivot that do not allow their students to attend college at night, such as Lakewood (New Jersey) and Mir (Brooklyn), arrange for them to receive a bachelor’s degree from colleges that grant credit for Talmud, Bible, Jewish thought, and Jewish law, enabling them to go on to advanced degrees when they leave the yeshiva. According to one study, fully 86 percent of the graduates of a representative haredi high school went on to pursue a college education, with as many as 48 percent undertaking some graduate study as well.10
According to Gonen, the adaptation of haredi education to long-term economic demands reflects a basic commitment to the value of parnasa, or economic self-sufficiency, which has been an anchor of Orthodox communal life for many generations. For this reason, the boys’ schools created by the Agudath Israel movement in the early twentieth century in Russia and Poland dedicated afternoon hours to studying the essential skills necessary for participation in the workforce. When building their communities in the United States, Gonen writes, haredi leaders insisted on secular studies in the schools, in an effort “to build a haredi educational system that would ensure the continuity of the haredi culture, yet at the same time allow the young generation to take part in the American economic system, and to extricate themselves from the economic hardship characteristic of many Jewish immigrants.”11 To both the leadership and the general haredi public in America, it is clear that without the full participation of the great majority in the workforce, the haredi way of life cannot sustain itself.
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
