From the Liveblog of
Thursday, November 28, 2024
Smotrich says labor minister must amend daycare subsidy criteria so as not to disadvantage reservists
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demands that Labor Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur amend the criteria for receiving child daycare subsidies to resolve an issue over the eligibility for IDF reservists.
Reservists were finding themselves “financially disadvantaged due to the reduction in their eligibility level as a result of the benefits and grants they received during the war,” Smotrich writes to Ben-Tzur.
He calls for adding a “designated eligibility level for reservists.”
Such a move would not require any additional budgetary outlays because it would simply return the reservists to the status they would have had before being mobilized, Smotrich insists.
Ben-Tzur, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, only recently published criteria for receiving the subsidy, following months of refusing to do so as part of a fierce struggle between the attorney general and the government surrounding child daycare subsidies for the Haredi population.
The fight erupted after the High Court ruled in June that ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students were obligated to perform military service after the law for blanket exemptions expired. In the same ruling, the court determined that the state could not fund such students. Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara said this meant that ultra-Orthodox families could not receive child daycare subsidies if the father had dodged the draft.
Following the attorney general’s determination, Ben-Tzur refused to publish the criteria for all 75,000 qualifying families, holding up the disbursement of some NIS 200 million ($53.5 million) and creating severe financial headaches for daycare centers.
However, last week, Ben-Tzur accepted a compromise offered by the High Court of Justice in which ultra-Orthodox families in which the father is obligated to perform military service but has failed to enlist will receive the subsidy for the first six months of this academic year.
A bill attempting to circumvent the High Court ruling and reinstate Haredi families’ eligibility for the subsidies was pulled from the Knesset agenda earlier this month due to intense pushback by members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.
