Deri says ultra-Orthodox ‘pushed into hardship’ by state, leading to Jerusalem daycare disaster

Shas chairman Aryeh Deri appears to blame Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and the High Court, at least in part, for today’s tragedy in Jerusalem, in which two babies died and 55 infants and children were injured at an overcrowded, unlicensed daycare in Jerusalem’s Haredi-majority Romema neighborhood.

Addressing his party’s MKs during their weekly faction meeting in the Knesset, Deri insists it is “forbidden to operate unlicensed daycares,” but that “at the same time, a deep soul-searching is also required.”

“Who can say ‘our hands did not shed this blood’? When a very large population is suddenly pushed into hardship, people are forced to look for other solutions, and the consequences can be harsh and bitter,” he declares in an apparent reference to cuts made to Haredi budgets following last year’s High Court of Justice ruling that Haredi exemptions from military service were illegal.

Since then, yeshivas harboring draft dodgers have seen their budgets slashed and the Attorney General’s Office instructed the Labor Ministry to cut daycare subsidies for the children of evaders.

Asked if there is a relationship between the cut to daycare subsidies and the tragedy, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich tells reporters ahead of his Religious Zionism party’s own faction meeting that “we are obligated to protect the lives of our children and grandchildren and to ensure they are placed in supervised, legal, orderly frameworks.”

Smotrich says that it’s “clear that when you block a public’s main path to licensed systems, a black market develops. I can’t say there wasn’t a black market before… but this is obvious.”

Queried as to whether his party would vote in favor of the government’s proposed conscription bill, Smotrich says that after the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee finishes its deliberations and presents a revised bill, his party will make a decision on how to vote.