Bill guaranteeing daycare subsidies to Haredi draft evaders advances to Knesset vote
Ministers vote in favor of legislation that Attorney General’s Office says constitutes ‘state and institutional encouragement’ for ultra-Orthodox evasion of military service
The government advanced to a Knesset vote on Sunday a bill that would guarantee the continuation of taxpayer-funded childcare subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox community despite a High Court of Justice ruling that such financial support is not legal in cases where the father should be serving in the Israel Defense Forces but is not.
The legislation, which was submitted last week, aims to guarantee that the children of ultra-Orthodox men who are obligated to perform military service, but have not done so, will continue to be eligible for state-paid daycare subsidies. The bill’s passage is a key political demand of the Haredi coalition parties Shas and UTJ.
The bill is highly controversial, with critics asserting that it would continue to encourage ultra-Orthodox men not to perform military service even as the IDF faces severe manpower shortages after a yearlong multifront war against the Hamas and Hezbollah terror groups.
Following its approval Sunday in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, the bill will now head to the Knesset for a vote in a preliminary reading, likely this Wednesday, said United Torah Judaism MK Yisrael Eichler, who initiated the measure.
Gideon Sa’ar, the chairman of the coalition’s New Hope party, said his party will vote against the legislation when it comes up for a Knesset vote, saying the bill “will convey a message of encouraging evasion from service in the IDF and will assist in doing so.”
Sa’ar, who joined the government in September and serves as a minister without portfolio, added that the coalition “must strive to carry out significant moves that increase the participation of all sections of the public” in military service.
Approval of the legislation was met with fierce denunciations from the opposition, with Yesh Atid declaring that the ministers who advanced the bill would be remembered for “treachery” and having stuck “a knife in the back of the middle class, IDF reservists, wounded IDF servicemen and the memory of the fallen.”
MK Matan Kahana of National Unity said the legislation “spat in the face of IDF reservists,” and said the impact of the bill would be to “whitewash and fund draft evasion.”
Writing to Levin earlier in the day, the Attorney General’s Office said that there was a legal impediment to the bill, since it sought to overcome the expiration in 2023 of the law allowing for blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, and a High Court ruling in June that they must enlist in the IDF as a result.
That ruling also determined that financial support for such students must stop, in the absence of a law allowing such men not to enlist.
“A Knesset law cannot be considered constitutional if it means that the principle of equality will be harmed through state and institutional encouragement of avoiding conscription into the IDF in defiance of the Law for Security Services, contrary to the needs of the IDF, and contrary to the obligation of equal burden [in military service],” the Attorney General’s Office told Levin.
The legislation is a private member’s bill, however, meaning that it does not need the approval of the Attorney General’s Office to be advanced in Knesset.
Previously, the law allowed families in which a mother works and a father studies full-time in yeshiva in lieu of military service to receive the subsidies, worth thousands of shekels a month for ultra-Orthodox families, which often have a large number of children.
From 2002 until 2018, the daycare subsidy was given to working mothers earning below a certain threshold to encourage female employment.
In 2021, then finance minister Avigdor Liberman changed the law, so that both a mother and father had to be employed in order to obtain the subsidy, so as to exclude families in which the father was a yeshiva student. The current government ensured, however, that a man engaged in full-time yeshiva study could be considered employed under the criteria for the subsidy.
The daycare subsidies constitute a critical component of the household economy of many ultra-Orthodox families, which is why the Haredi parties have exerted heavy pressure on the government to reinstate them.
Last week, UTJ submitted the bill after backing down on its threat to derail government budget talks unless the coalition first passed a new law reinstating blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.
A bill that seeks to regulate the issue, known as the enlistment law, is currently stuck in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, whose chairman, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, has said that it will only pass if lawmakers can reach a “broad consensus” on the matter.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
