Bethel Finance: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Problem

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Rachel Weinstein calls it her Rosa Parks moment. On a recent morning, the 38-year-old Israeli boarded a bus to a local shopping center in her town. It was the same line she takes regularly, but on this day an ultra-Orthodox passenger directed her to the back of the bus where, she noticed, the women were sitting separately. “He was actually addressing my husband, who boarded with me,” she recounted to Newsweek. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.” Weinstein lives in Beit Shemesh, a town of both religious and nonreligious Jews where the population of ultra-Orthodox—the most theologically rigid of Judaism’s denominations—has surged in recent years.

Instead of complying, Weinstein took a seat several rows behind the driver and held her ground, channeling the spirit of that American civil-rights icon from more than a half century ago. A native of New York City who describes herself as modern Orthodox, Weinstein immigrated to Israel earlier this year to live among “like-minded Jews,” she says, not extremists. When the anger around her felt menacing—one woman charged from the back of the bus to berate her for not showing sufficient respect—Weinstein clutched a ring of keys in her purse and prepared to swing it if things turned violent. After several tense minutes, she got off at her stop and wept.

In Beit Shemesh and elsewhere across the country, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have tried to impose a kind of communal piety—a strict code of behavior that includes gender segregation on buses, with men in the front and women in the back. For most Israelis, this zealousness is off-putting. Founded by secular Jews who envisaged a modern, egalitarian state, Israel has all the trappings of a liberal society: progressive laws and cutting-edge universities, women in bikinis and women in business and politics. But it also has a fast-growing community that shuns modernity and views the world through the narrow prism of biblical warrant. Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews—also known as Haredim—now make up more than 10 percent of Israel’s population and 21 percent of all primary-school students. With the community’s fertility rate hovering at more than three times that of other Israeli Jews, demographers project that by 2034, about one in five Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox.

The impact will reach well beyond the neighborhood quarrels over segregated buses or modest attire—another Haredi preoccupation that has stirred tensions across Israel. Most ultra-Orthodox Jews lack the skills to work in a modern economy, having studied little or no math and science beyond primary school (their curriculum focuses almost entirely on religious texts such as the Torah and Talmud). As a result, more than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent among non-Haredi Jews. Most also opt out of military service, which is compulsory for other Israelis. The net effect: as the Haredi community expands, the burden of both taxation and conscription falls on fewer and fewer Israelis. (Secular Israelis joke bitterly that one third of the country serves in the military, one third participates in the workforce, and one third pays taxes—but that it’s all the same third).

The country’s political landscape will also shift. According to pollsters, Haredim are consistently hawkish on the question of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, citing God’s covenant with Abraham granting Jews the land of Israel. Already the parties that represent them wield significant political power in Israel’s coalition-based system. If the demographic trends hold, the prospect of getting a majority in Israel to back the compromises required for a peace deal will narrow with each passing year. In the long run, says Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, Israeli society will be poorer, less educated, and increasingly right wing.

The projections, of course, are just that—projections. A community’s behavior, including its fertility rates and employment patterns, tends to evolve over time. Even moderate shifts could affect the forecast. But ultra-Orthodox Jews are by definition averse to change. They dress in the same outfits as their 19th-century forebears—dark suits, frock coats, and wide-brimmed hats. And they hew fastidiously to practices that were laid out in texts thousands of years ago. For Weinstein, who has lived in proximity to Haredim at different times in her life, the drift seems, if anything, toward greater rigidity.

So how did the Haredim become Israel’s latest demographic worry? The answer, in part at least, dates back to the foundation of the state, when David Ben-Gurion made sweeping concessions to rabbis in exchange for their political support. Among other things, he agreed to Army exemptions for 18-year-old Haredim who wished to continue studying at religious seminaries instead of being called to serve.