Does the 2025 state budget encourage Haredim to evade IDF service?

In late March, amidst a renewed Israeli ground operation in the Gaza Strip and a growing IDF manpower shortage, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through what critics have come to call the “evasion budget.”

Allocating over NIS 100 billion ($26.4 billion) for defense and just over NIS 92 billion ($25 billion) for the Education Ministry, the budget also cut around NIS 3 billion ($814 million) across various ministries — affecting the salaries of public sector workers such as teachers and social workers — while not touching funds for ultra-Orthodox educational institutions and ministries previously described as superfluous by treasury officials.

In addition, it featured NIS 5 billion ($1.3 billion) in so-called coalition funds — more than NIS 1.8 billion of which went to the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community.

This included NIS 1.27 billion ($351 million) for yeshivas, NIS 75 million ($20.7 million) for women’s seminaries, NIS 87 million ($24 million) for strengthening Jewish identity, NIS 60 million ($16.5 million) for yeshivas for overseas students, and NIS 2.9 million ($792,000) for matters relating to Jewish “family purity” laws.

The coalition funds also included NIS 28 million ($7.7 million) for programs to prevent Haredim from dropping out of yeshivas and NIS 8 million ($2.2 million) for “coordination and liaison bodies” — a reference to groups that arrange military exemptions.

(Funding for at least one such group appears to be frozen until the Knesset can pass a bill enshrining yeshiva students’ exemptions.)

Refusal to serve

Comprising 1.39 million people, or 13 percent of the population, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox largely eschew army service in favor of full-time yeshiva study, a phenomenon that has generated significant anger among national-religious and secular Israelis increasingly burdened by repeated stints in reserve duty in the 18 months since October 7.

This refusal to serve has continued even after the High Court of Justice ruled last summer that there was no longer any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice of granting them blanket exemptions from army service.

The army has stated that it is facing a manpower shortage and currently needs some 12,000 new soldiers — 7,000 of whom would be combat troops — but according to the IDF’s Personnel Directorate, only 2% of the 10,000 ultra-Orthodox men sent conscription orders from July 2024 to March 2025 have actually enlisted.

Since then, there have been increasing calls, including from the Finance Ministry and Attorney General’s Office, to establish personal penalties on draft dodgers, including sanctions affecting a range of areas from housing and business subsidies to property tax discounts.

In a letter sent to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in February, Yogev Gardos, the head of the Finance Ministry’s budget department, argued that sanctions would only be effective if they have a significant impact on household income, continue “over a long period of time,” and cannot be bypassed through alternative funding channels.

Haredi benefits

According to the Knesset Research and Information Center, members of the ultra-Orthodox community currently enjoy a range of benefits, including reduced fares on public transit, housing assistance and municipal tax discounts.

In addition, as of January 2024, around 71% of nearly 200,000 Haredim registered in Torah institutions paid reduced National Insurance Institute contributions, leading to an annual loss of NIS 99.1 million ($26 million) in revenue for the social security agency.

Not every benefit has remained active, however. In February, acting on the instructions of the Attorney General’s Office, the Labor and Welfare Ministry halted daycare subsidies for the children of ultra-Orthodox men who did not serve in the military.

However, this has not been enough to mollify critics, many of whom have argued that by largely failing to curb expenditures on the ultra-Orthodox community, the budget is essentially subsidizing their low workforce participation and full-time yeshiva studies.

Encouraging evasion?

“NIS 1.3 billion for yeshivas is unequivocally encouraging evasion and is an incentive not to work,” Yesh Atid lawmaker Vladimir Beliak told The Times of Israel in a WhatsApp message, arguing that continuing to fund the ultra-Orthodox educational system without change “causes enormous damage to the economy and society.”

However, Moshe Roth, a lawmaker for the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, dismissed such criticisms, telling The Times of Israel that his community was “a good punching bag” for members of the opposition looking “to make the government look bad.”

Roth challenged the notion of a connection between daycare subsidies and draft evasion, arguing that cuts to those subsidies meant the budget actually “gives the Haredi community much less than they deserve.”

Roth claimed that rather than being a drain on the economy, the ultra-Orthodox community actually contributes more than it receives and that, at the end of the day, there was “no difference between those that work and those that don’t work” in terms of how much tax revenue they generate.

“The Haredi people are being slandered, are being delegitimized,” he said.

Asked about previous comments in which he denied that the IDF was grappling with a manpower shortage, Roth blamed the lack of soldiers on what he alleged was the army’s failure to properly utilize available manpower.

“There’s an overwhelmingly surplus of people that are in the army, but they are not part of the fighting units,” he claimed — arguing without proof that only half of the reservists being mobilized have been “utilized.”

“We have tens of thousands of soldiers sitting in army bases or sitting in the [IDF military headquarters in Tel Aviv] with nothing to do, simply wasting their time,” he insisted without providing evidence.

Roth also denied that the ultra-Orthodox, as a community, do not serve, insisting that “there’s no sector that’s exempt.”

“The only people who are exempt are yeshiva students. Yeshiva students are a very small percentage,” he contended.

Such claims betray a “lack of understanding of the data,” countered Yesh Atid MK Moshe Tur-Paz, a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves and, like Roth, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

“In every army, there are always about 80% of soldiers who are in staff roles — these are called ‘jobniks’ — and 20% who serve in combat. That’s how it is in the IDF,” he said, arguing that the army had “done a tremendous job in recent years to fully utilize its manpower.”

The IDF contains 8,000 female combat soldiers and 4,000 Arab Muslim volunteers who serve in the place of Haredim who have not enlisted, he said, slamming Roth for claiming that the IDF hasn’t fully utilized other social groups while “the Haredi population does not do the minimum required.”

According to a 2024 study by the Israel Democracy Institute, only 1.7% of Haredi men of military age actually serve, as opposed to 87.6% among all other Israeli Jews.

Money on the shelf

According to Aviad Houminer-Rosenblum, the deputy director of the Berl Katznelson Center think tank, the state’s overall yeshiva budget “has increased greatly in recent years” under Netanyahu, although many yeshivas are still unable to receive what they had in previous years.

Last April, an interim order by the High Court of Justice barring the government from providing funds to ultra-Orthodox yeshivas for students eligible for IDF enlistment went into effect, effectively ending the transfer of subsidies for tens of thousands of full-time students. (Israeli rabbis have since raised nearly $100 million in the US to cover the shortfall.)

As such, significant funding intended for these students is effectively frozen, pending the passage of legislation reintroducing their service exemptions, Houminer-Rosenblum said.

He also noted that the government is funding so-called “dropout yeshivas,” which cater to people in the process of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy — some of which actively encourage their students to work or pursue higher education.

“It’s really the most evasive thing possible,” Houminer-Rosenblum said, arguing that the yeshivas keep their students out of the army even though “many of them are probably not Haredi and all of them probably don’t study Torah.”

Yeshiva students aged 18-26 are unlikely to receive anything under the current budget, and the entire community is pinning its hopes on the passage of an enlistment bill reinstating exemptions so that the money will again flow, agreed Yanki Farber, a reporter for the ultra-Orthodox Behadrei Haredim news site.

The money is “on the shelf. It’s on hold,” he said. “They’re waiting for the conscription law to pass. So far it hasn’t passed, but they’re waiting.”

Asked for comment, an Education Ministry spokesperson said in a statement that “the budget transferred to Torah institutions for 2025 decreased compared to the previous year, in accordance with a government decision and changes in allocations determined within its framework.

“In addition, in accordance with a High Court ruling, support for students who are required to enlist and do not hold a valid service deferment cannot be included in the budget. The total budget allocated for this year reflects the approved budgetary framework and the legal requirements as determined in government decisions and case law,” the statement continued.