As 1,000 IDF draft orders are sent out, most Haredim adopt a wait-and-see attitude

Israelis are bracing for unrest after the army sent draft orders Sunday to 1,000 Haredi men. A court-mandated move, to date it’s the most concrete challenge to the decades-long exemption of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from military service.

But in Haredi neighborhoods, would-be conscripts exhibit no concern.

“We’re not worried,” one yeshiva student, Uriah, 17, told The Times of Israel on Sunday on a cigarette break from his studies in Ramat Vizhnitz, a Haredi neighborhood of Haifa. His classmate, Michael Gutmann, added: “They can’t forcibly conscript us.”

Both youths said they would consider enlisting, however, if the army provided them with “Haredi-appropriate” frameworks, which is in line with a recent Smith Consulting poll presented to the Knesset State Control Committee in which 59 percent of those surveyed indicated that tracks allowing them to maintain their lifestyle would have a beneficial effect on overall enlistment numbers.

The Haifa pair’s intransigent yet passive attitude dovetails with the broader response of Israel’s Haredi minority — about 13% of the population — to the current push for universal conscription. Its leaders have publicly and defiantly told recruits to ignore draft orders, but as yet have stopped short of staging the disruptive mass protests of previous rounds.

The timing and circumstances of ongoing military conflicts on multiple fronts may play into a relatively muted response by Haredim, bolstered by confidence in their ability to ultimately avoid mass conscription while their political parties remain in the coalition.

Many Haredim may also prefer not to mobilize amid rising resentment by non-Haredim over an unbalanced military obligation that they view as untenable and unjust amid the manpower strains in the army.

Only a few thousand Haredi extremists have so far staged violent protests, enough to raise some concerns about the prospect of wartime friction with authorities.

“The fringe, which is not under the control of the mainstream rabbis, is making noise but they’re the exception to the rule,” said Avishai Ben Haim, a prominent journalist for Channel 13 who reports extensively about Haredi society. “Instead of fighting the waves, Haredi leaders prefer to swim under them,” he added.

Haredi-friendly coalition

Ben Haim noted that the current government is among the Haredi-friendliest in decades, and not the instigator of the draft orders. The High Court of Justice ordered the army to start enlisting Haredim in a dramatic June 25 ruling that effectively ended the exemption, at least on the judicial level.

“Haredi representatives are in government and would gladly help to get around the High Court ruling, if they could. So there’s no point in demonstrating. They’re just keeping a low profile,” said Ben Haim.

Several thousand Haredim held an unlicensed protest rally on June 30 in Jerusalem, where police dispersed them with a water cannon. Last week, dozens of Haredi rioters attacked two senior Israel Defense Forces officers who were in Bnei Brak for meetings on the draft with top rabbis. They were not injured.

Orchestrated by members of the Eda Haredit radical stream of Haredi society, both events were relatively minor compared to mobilizations such as the mass Haredi demonstration of 2014. Triggered by a bill that proposed to drastically limit the number of exemptions and introduce sanctions for noncompliance, it resulted in hundreds of thousands of Haredim blocking Jerusalem’s center for hours, shutting down traffic amid clashes with police.

At the time, Haredi parties were in the opposition. The bill passed but was later softened by amendments and the High Court of Justice nullified the amended law in 2017, saying it was incompatible with equality. The June 25 ruling was the latest in a series of judicial interventions citing this principle against the Haredi exemption.

‘A matter of life or death’

The years-long struggle over the draft issue has convinced many Haredim of the infeasibility of any plan to draft the 60,000-odd yeshiva students who, before June 25,  had been exempted as per agreements that dated back to Israel’s establishment.

“It’ll come down to money, a deal will be worked out,” said Azriel, a 28-year-old father of three from Haifa and a full-time student of a kollel, a seminary for married men, affiliated with the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty. At one of the dozens of small synagogues that dot his Haredi neighborhood of Haifa, he envisaged an arrangement in which Haredim give up some state funding and keep the exemption.

But yeshivas are tight for money as it is, he conceded. His synagogue has a coin-operated airconditioner that worshipers feed from a communal jar. The money usually runs out at around 3 p.m. and the sweltering heat of the Carmel Mountain in July quickly creeps in.

The state is currently funding yeshivas to the tune of NIS 1.7 billion ($477 million) annually. But that funding is facing a 30% slash because it’s allocated partly on a per-student basis. The court in its June 25 ruling also ordered the state to halt this funding for students who used to be exempted.

“The money will come, don’t worry,” said Azriel, because Haredi philanthropists will pick up the shortfall.

But wouldn’t it be easier to just enlist for a couple of years like most other Israeli Jews?

“Not enlisting is a matter of life or death for us,” Azriel said. “That’s why they won’t forcibly conscript, because we’d rather die.”

To Azriel and many other Haredim, “the draft is an attempt to secularize us.” Manpower shortages, he said, “are just the excuse. Our society has evolved to resist secularization. It’s the fiber of our being.”

Michael Guttmann, the yeshiva student, respectfully interjected. “You know, I actually wouldn’t mind enlisting if they make units truly appropriate for Haredim,” he said. Uriah added: “But only if the rabbis authorize it. Which would never happen. But in principle, sure.”

Prayer warriors?

Eliyahu Glatzenberg, co-founder of the Achvat Torah nonprofit that encourages military service among Haredim, said that the exemption “has support but it’s not unanimous.” He said, “Many Haredim support military enlistment or national service. There’s a decentralization of authority in Haredi society; it’s not clear that rabbis can even muster the numbers [of protesters] we saw in 2014.”

All Haredi interviewees for this article said they prioritized prayers for the soldiers and hostages, at synagogues and elsewhere. Casualties would be higher if not for their prayers, which “work miracles on the ground in Gaza,” as Uriah put it. “I know you don’t see it that way,” he added.

The IDF has units that are meant to accommodate the needs of Haredi troops, such as Netzah Yehuda, and is planning to create new and better ones, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit has said.

But following the June 25 ruling, several prominent rabbis, including Sephardic spiritual leaders from the Shas movement and non-Hasidic Ashkenazi ones like Dov Lando, have called on Haredim who get called up to ignore the summons.

Meanwhile, in non-Haredi society, the exemption issue is something of a side issue in the wave of protests against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which many blame for not preventing the October 7 Hamas onslaught.

Some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists murdered about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 that day. The failure to retrieve the hostages after more than nine months of fighting in Gaza and the perceived negligence that led to the invasion are the focus of weekly protests, where the push for a Haredi draft is rarely highlighted.

Only about 100 people showed up to a protest rally last week for universal draft near the Modiin-area home of IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.

One of them was Rachel Shteinman, a mother of three sons, two of whom are serving in Gaza. She attributed the low turnout to the war.

“It dominates the agenda,” she said, adding that she had not participated before the Modiin rally in any protest action that wasn’t directly tied to the fighting.

But with each week that her sons are in Gaza, she said, “the weight of the worry is simply crushing me. They’re not being relieved because we don’t have enough troops.”

Because of the war, she said, “I am feeling the absence of a Haredi draft on my flesh.”