The Eda Haharedit community, the prominent anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, has been raging and roiling in recent weeks. The discovery of an episode that touches on the core of the group’s ideology has caused a shock and a conflict that has involved insults, vandalism and even physical violence. The cause of the controversy: The administrators of the community’s educational institutions who claim, seemingly, not to depend in any way on the state’s funding, secretly enjoyed government money.
It all started in June when the parents of the girls’ school Hokhmat Lev, located in the ultra-Orthodox Me’ah She’arim neighborhood in Jerusalem, were surprised to learn that the school, contrary to its principals’ official assertion, secretly receives funding from the Israeli Ministry of Education. This was uncovered after a Ministry of Education supervisor was spotted by one of the parents at the school’s office. From that moment the suspicion arose among parents that there’s secret cooperation between the school and the Ministry of Education, and after an independent investigation by parents it turned out that the institution does indeed secretly receive funding from the state by means of a nonprofit organization unknown to the parents.