Kosher cellphone bill sparks debate on Haredi consumer freedoms vs communal coercion
New legislation would reinforce phone plans that are under rabbinical censorship, raising questions about internal societal pressures and control
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Like hundreds of thousands of Haredi Israelis, Daniel Saban has a cellphone plan that blocks all mainstream radio stations, theaters, emotional support helplines and many other numbers deemed immoral by his community’s spiritual leaders.
A 34-year-old father of four from Ofakim, Saban can neither tweak those filters nor switch plans and keep his current phone number because it’s a so-called “kosher” subscription.
This special kosher category persists despite laws designed to give consumers more freedom to choose and tailor their own plans. Yet Saban is not interested in the freedom afforded by those laws: He supports a newly submitted bill by Haredi lawmakers in the Knesset to dial back those laws so that the restrictions on kosher subscriptions become judicially incontestable.
The bill is reigniting a debate about the meaning of consumer freedoms in the context of Haredi hierarchal societies, and the state’s role in accommodating their preferences.
The new bill would give legal grounds to how carriers currently lock in place subscriptions for Haredim, which have identifiable digits designating them as part of these rabbi-approved plans. The bill would make sure those subscriptions remain impervious to Israel’s so-called portability reform of 2005, which freed most subscribers to switch carriers or plans while keeping their phone number.
Opponents of the bill, which cleared committee last week toward a plenum vote, say it cements control over consumers by rabbis and by carriers guided by financial interests. Supporters say it would afford hundreds of thousands of consumers guarantees of the integrity of the kosher phone service they’re buying.
Rabbinical approval, Saban said, “is part of the product. Just like I eat only food with a kosher certificate because I require external approval, I want a phone with external, rabbinical approval.” Saban studies full-time in a kollel, a religious seminary for married men, he told The Times of Israel.
Religious freedom — or coercion?
Lawmakers on either side of the debate began arguing over the proposed legislation almost immediately on Wednesday at the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee discussions that led to the bill’s progression toward the plenum.
“I’m surprised that a pluralist should object to this bill,” the committee’s chair, David Bitan of Likud, said teasingly to Labor MK Gilad Kariv. To Bitan, the bill ensures that the product meets Haredi consumers’ expectations, he said.
Kariv replied: “I object to the abuse of pluralism to actually limit people’s choice.”
Haredi consumers, Kariv later said, “have every right to buy filtered communications services but what is unacceptable is an arrangement that turns the cellphone into a means for identification and control within the community.”
Kariv was referencing the expectation in many Haredi communities that their members use kosher subscriptions with the identifiable initial digits (84/85 for the 054 prefix, 71/76 for 052, 41 for 050 and 31/41 for 053). In addition to having hundreds of inaccessible numbers, kosher subscriptions charge high rates on Shabbat, even for calling emergency services.
It is expected that parents give kosher numbers when providing their contact details to their children’s educational frameworks, among other communal institutions.
Allowing owners of kosher subscriptions to keep their phone number and switch out of their plans would eliminate the kosher digits as a social marker. According to a Haredi businessman from Bnei Brak who spoke to The Times of Israel anonymously, the move would liberate some but deprive others of the very point of the product they are paying for.
The Bnei Brak businessman is one of many Haredim who found a relatively simple way of enjoying the best of both worlds: He keeps two phones.
“From a cellular perspective, I lead a double life,” the businessman said jokingly. “I’m one of thousands of Haredim who keep a kosher phone for communal purposes and a non-kosher one as well,” he said. “You can always get another SIM card.”
But not everyone can afford two phone plans or even two phones in Haredi society, where the average salary is almost half the non-Haredi one, the Bnei Brak businessman conceded.
“That’s good, though. Young yeshiva students shouldn’t have unfiltered access,” the businessman said, noting that secular families also filter their children’s content.
Haredi consumers are hardly ‘mindless sheep’
Saban condemns the approach of those who reject the immovability of the kosher phone plans.
“It’s patronizing, for talking over our heads about this as if the rabbis decide and we’re just mindless sheep with no consumer rights. It’s hypocritical, for trying to exert their control over us while pretending to shield us from the control of others,” he said.
Most kosher plans are overseen by the Rabbinical Committee for Communications, a forum of top rabbis from across the Haredi spectrum. Its approval is an important social factor for Saban, he said.
“When another parent reaches out to us to arrange a playdate, their number indicates whether their home is an appropriate setting,” he said.
Many Haredi Israelis, including followers of the Chabad Hasidic movement, have phone numbers without the distinctive kosher plan digits — often because they opt for other filtering services without the official rabbinical committee’s approval.
Likewise, most kosher plan subscribers don’t use smartphones, which Haredi rabbis generally forbid their followers to use. (The war on smartphones, led by Haredi radicals, is an overlapping but separate issue from kosher plans, which apply also to so-called dumb phones.)
Who calls the shots?
Kosher cellular plans have been a legal issue since Israel’s 2005 portability reform, which encouraged competition and lowered prices because it freed clients to switch carriers without losing their number. Kosher plans have been de facto excluded from the reform, leaving both the filters and the terms of these plans in the hands of the Rabbinical Committee for Communications.
In 2019, the High Court of Justice heard a petition by the Reform Movement and three gay rights groups to end the kosher plans’ blockage of emotional support hotlines for gay people. The court ordered the state to respond, prompting Haredi parties to legislate an exception that would withstand judicial scrutiny.
Three years later, it was the turn of Haredim to petition the court. They asked it to block the government’s plan to force carriers to make kosher subscriptions portable (meaning that subscribers would get to keep their number regardless of the carrier or plan.) The court issued an injunction that froze the plan led by the government of former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which had no Haredi coalition partners.
Some perceived abuse of power has been documented in the management of kosher plans. Simcha Rothman, a coalition lawmaker for Religious Zionism, in a Knesset discussion in February, said he was aware of at least one case in which a committee affiliated with one Hasidic dynasty blocked its kosher lines to communication with other kosher lines managed by rabbis from another dynasty.
The Knesset committee’s legal adviser, Itai Atzmon, said during the discussion Wednesday that under the new law, the carriers would need to publish and adhere to “egalitarian and transparent” filtering criteria for kosher plans. Severing communication to other kosher plan subscribers would not be possible, among other practices.
Saban, the 34-year-old from Ofakim, supports such guardrails, he said.
“There should be some protections in place, for sure. But individual cases of abuse are no reason to outlaw a legitimate product while claiming it’s for our own good, only because Haredim use it,” he said.
