UTJ head sets price of support: Draft exemptions, school funding and religion-state status quo

United Torah Judaism head Yaakov Asher tells the Haredi Kikar Hashabbat news site that the party won’t join any coalition unless it meets its demands on military conscription, funding for unregulated education and preservation of ultra-Orthodox hegemony over certain aspects of public life.

Asher says conscription exemptions for yeshiva students and those in other Jewish learning institutes must be “worked out,” albeit without providing details about the sort of arrangement he wants to see. “Without that there won’t be anything,” he says of the matter, which he calls the most important.

Asher also says that UTJ will only support a coalition that commits to leaving money for Haredi schools untouched and does not attempt to condition funding on meeting core curriculum requirements. “Nobody should try to think that they will [be the ones to] educate our kids,” he says.

His third demand is maintenance of “the status quo between religion and state,” referring to policies in place that impose Jewish halachic rules on aspects of public life, such as prohibiting commerce on Shabbat.

“It’s our responsibility to preserve the image of the entire state, not just Bnei Brak or the Haredi neighborhoods of Jerusalem, but… everything,” the head of the anti-Zionist party says.

Asher presents the three demands as nonnegotiable, saying his party won’t join any coalition that doesn’t agree to all three.

Meanwhile, fellow UTJ lawmaker Yitzhak Goldknopf tells Channel 12 that discussions are already underway with Eisenkot’s camp.

“Eisenkot knows what we want. There have been preliminary contacts, and there is room for negotiations,” he says, adding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also in talks with the party, but “that doesn’t mean anything.”