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The World’s Matthew Bell reports on the debate in Israel over the tens of thousands of ultra-orthodox men who spend their days studying the Torah instead of working. It’s an arrangement often subsidized by the state, and some say it’s setting Israel up for an economic disaster soon. Download MP3
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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. In Israel there are schools were adult men dedicate themselves to studying religious texts full time. These schools are called yeshivas. Israeli politicians are divided over whether yeshiva students should be paid a stipend by the government. That had been established policy until the courts ruled against the practice. A bill currently before the Israeli Parliament would reinstate the payments, but many Israelis are questioning the move. The World’s Matthew Bell reports from Jerusalem.
MATTHEW BELL: Ultra-orthodox men dressed in black and white are crammed into a classroom at a Jerusalem yeshiva. They are Haredin. In Hebrew, the world means “those who tremble before the [SOUNDS LIKE] ah of God. For them, it’s hard to overstate the importance of studying Torah, over just about everything else in life. So many ultra-orthodox Israelis are engaged in full-time religious study that it’s having a problematic effect on the country’s economy.
DAN BEN-DAVID: Well, it means that fewer people are producing the pie that we eat and so the pie’s smaller by definition, which means that the average slice of the pie, in other words GDP per capita, is going to be smaller. It’s a problem. There’s a whole chunk of the Israeli population that is simply not a part of the ball game.
BELL: Dan Ben-David is an Israeli economist whose research on Haredi non-employment has kicked up a whirlwind of interest here. He says Israel’s ultra-orthodox community has grown to about 800,000 people. Nearly 10% of the population. The Haredi birthrate is triple the national average and more than two-thirds of ultra-orthodox men do not work. Most ominous of all, Ben-David says, the children of the Haredin are not getting the kind of education that’s needed in a first world economy like Israel’s. That’s because they go to their own schools and their studies are heavily focused on religion.
BEN-DAVID: It they’re 1% of the population, it’s one issue. But if your kids enrollment increased by 50% in just one decade and your kids are already roughly a quarter of the education system, hey, at what time do you start assuming responsibility for this country?
BELL: In one of Jerusalem’s Haredi neighborhoods there is wariness about the outside world imposing itself on a closed, deeply conservative, and devout lifestyle. 60-year-old [SOUNDS LIKE] Ephraim Kenny tells me he’s been studying Torah all his life. No economist or Israeli politician, he suggests, should be forcing the Haredin out of the study halls and into the workplace.
SPEAKING HEBREW
EPHRAIM KENNY: We believe that those who learn Torah help the economy a lot more than if they would go out and work. It’s the other way around. Those who go out and work endanger the entire community. That’s our belief. We have to Torah learners. It protected all the people of Israel throughout the generations. These things cannot be changed.
BELL: But Israel’s finance minister recently said things have to change. If they don’t the Jewish state will face an economic catastrophe and ten short years. But there are signs of changing attitudes toward work and Torah study in the Haredi community.
YAKOV: I always felt very comfortable with numbers. I liked playing with numbers, even though we never learnt math at a very high level. So, when I was looking what I should study, I decided I should do an MBA.
BELL: A 30-year-old Haredi father of three gives his name as [PH] Yakov. He says it wasn’t easy to decide to cut back on Torah study to four days a week, but his wife already works full time and making ends meet is tough. So, Yakov signed up with a non-governmental organization called The Kemach Foundation which gives Haredin scholarships for job training or education.
YAKOV: In our community, it was like a secret. If one wanted to go and study something else, he had to hide it or do it in a way no one would know about it. And I realized I’m not the only one.
JACK SCHULDENFREI: We are not proselytizing within the Haredi community.
BELL: Jack Schuldenfrei is a British-born Israeli and the founder of Kemach.
SCHULDENFREI: People have spoken to each other within the community and they’ve come to us because they’ve heard that Kemach will provide them with an opportunity to obtain some sort of qualification. So, there’s no outsider coming in and trying to change the community. We don’t want to change the community. We want to enable the community to take its proper place, within its own limitations, within Israeli society. And to prevent, over the long term, what is going to be an economic disaster for this country if this problem is not solved.
BELL: Since 2007, Kemach has graduated more than 500 ultra-orthodox students and most of them have found jobs. Now it’s teaming up with another NGO and aims to expand to 2,500 Haredi graduates a year. Economist Dan Ben-David applauds the effort, but he says in the long term, job training for adults isn’t the solution.
BEN-DAVID: A Haredi adult with ten or fifteen children in the house will not start now to learn 8th grade algebra and 11th or 12th grade calculus and physics. They’re not going to study that stuff. So, what they’re doing is like putting your finger in the dyke. It helps in the very, very short run. We need some fundamental, core treatment of this problem which means get these kids a good education.
BELL: But education reform is all about politics. And that’s an area where the ultra-orthodox community has some powerful advocates. For The World, I’m Matthew Bell in Jerusalem.
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