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PDF FormatDriven 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
And yet, while the poverty and dependence of haredi families are increasing, their traditional sources of income are showing signs of drying up. The three principal sources are government subsidy, family assistance, and working wives. Government subsidy takes up the lion’s share, coming in a number of different forms: A monthly allocation per student in the amount of around $200, paid by the Religious Affairs Ministry to yeshivot (and largely passed on to students in the form of stipends); generous child allocations from the National Insurance Institute, which increase with the number of children in the family; and supplemental income for those below the poverty line, paid by the National Insurance Institute. In 1998, this assistance included $219 million paid directly to yeshivot and $29 million in income supplements.36 Moreover, haredim receive generous discounts on municipal property taxes and nursery-school fees. According to journalist Shahar Ilan, whose recent book, Haredim, Inc., is a thoroughly researched account of the haredi community, the average haredi family with six children, in which the father does not work, received in the year 1999 between $17,600 and $22,500 in transfer payments, tax relief, and other subsidies.37
As poverty deepens and the dependent haredi population expands, the politicians of the religious parties press for more social spending that will benefit their constituents, fanning what Menachem Friedman terms the “awesome hatred of haredim” among the general public.38 The situation prompted Vered Dar, deputy head of the Finance Ministry’s Economics and State Revenues Department, to remark: “I don’t know where it will explode first: Will the secular population say they are no longer willing to bear the burden, or will the haredim say there is a limit to poverty?”39 According to Friedman, there is no way the government can continue funding the haredi sector at current levels. The last two decades have seen a dramatic shift away from the traditional statist economic policies in Israel, and an increasing belief that there is something wrong with widespread dependence on government transfers. As Friedman puts it, “People are sick and tired of giving money.”
