Yedidia Stern, a renowned law professor at Bar-Ilan University, skullcap on his head, recalls how as a child, he walked the streets of Tel Aviv with his father on their way to the synagogue. He was dressed in a white shirt, just like his father, and the two of them were marching solemnly to welcome the Sabbath. He still remembers, as if the years had not passed, what it felt like to be a religious Jew in those early years of the state. It was tantamount to living on the edge of society. The then-young Israeli state was celebrating its secularism and Israeli experience, and viewed religion and skullcap-wearing religious Jews as characteristic of Jewish life in the Diaspora. For years, religious Jews were considered a minor sector, trailing behind secular Zionism.
“As a child, I believed that it was bound to be like that — that I and my religious friends were destined to it,” Stern reminisced in his office at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, where he serves as vice president of research. “At the time, I thought that since I belonged to a small, inconsequential sector, I could not hope for a great future. We had no big dreams. We regarded the secular (sector) as the lords of the land, and this was true in particular in Tel Aviv, the most secular of Israeli cities.”