Haredi lawmakers split on approach to budget, which must pass this month or gov’t falls
While UTJ chair Goldknopf threatens to send Israel to elections if Haredi draft-exemption bill not passed, other ultra-Orthodox MKs say problems solved with $280 million now in budget base
Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers Aryeh Deri and Moshe Gafni said Thursday they’d secured some NIS 1 billion ($280 million) for Haredi institutions in the 2025 budget base, claiming to have resolved one of the problems cited by fellow Haredi MK Yitzhak Goldknopf, whose continued refusal to commit to voting for the budget potentially threatens to topple the government.
In a joint statement on Thursday, the Shas party chairman and leader of the Degel HaTorah faction within the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party said that the funds for yeshivas and other Haredi institutions would not be classed as “coalition funds” — administered by the government, without an automatic rollover into next year — but rather as part of the 2025 budget base, legislated by the Knesset itself, and that such funds were to be part of the budget base going forward, starting in 2026.
In making the joint statement, the two politicians seemed to implicitly separate themselves from the approach of UTJ chair Yitzhak Goldknopf, who has staked out a position opposing the passage of the budget — without which the government will collapse at the end of the month — until a highly controversial law to codify Haredi military exemptions from military draft goes through first.
Goldknopf, who leads UTJ and its Hasidic faction — as opposed to the non-Hasidic, Degel HaTorah faction led by Gafni — has also opposed the existing budget on the basis that the funds for Haredi institutions were included as coalition funds.
According to Ynet, those in Goldknopf’s orbit also claimed on Wednesday night that the funds had been moved into the budget base. The Times of Israel was not able to verify the claims surrounding the funds’ allocation.
In their joint statement Thursday, Deri and Gafni said: “For many years, we’ve struggled tenaciously to take the yeshiva funding out of the ‘coalition funds’ clauses, which were the focus of continuing incitement against Torah students. With divine help, we’ve succeeded.
“We welcome the historic achievement of introducing NIS 1 billion from the yeshiva budget into the budget base, a step that expresses the righting of a great injustice and the official recognition by the state of the value of Torah study. In addition, the move will ensure stability and long-term planning ability for the administrators of [Torah] institutions,” the pair continued.
They added, however, that the issue of conscription of yeshiva students “keeps us awake at night,” adding: “Under the guidance of [our rabbis] we are continuing to work determinedly to settle the issue – and we will not rest or be silent until every threat to Torah students in Israel is removed.”
The coalition has been repeatedly riven by efforts to reinstate a longstanding, de-facto exemption for Haredi yeshiva students from mandatory military service, with Haredi lawmakers repeatedly threatening to collapse the government and then walking back the threats.
The efforts to legislate the exemption come after the High Court of Justice last year ruled that the government must draft Haredi men into the military, and amid demands by the military for more soldiers, including combat troops, as it works both to recoup its losses and scale up amid the ongoing war.
Netanyahu has repeatedly promised a quick resolution to the enlistment issue in recent months, while a bill dealing with the issue is currently stuck in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who chairs the committee, has stated that he would “only produce a real conscription law that will significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base.”
