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Instead of forced enlistment, Israeli leadership must dialogue with ultra-Orthodox

Instead of demanding that the ultra-Orthodox enlist in the army — like the secular parties insisted during election campaigns — Israel’s political leadership must open a dialogue with the ultra-Orthodox leadership about academic studies and the labor market.
Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish men protest against the detention of a member of their community who refuses to serve in the Israeli army, in Jerusalem November 28, 2018. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun - RC1F0E35C7C0
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Ostensibly, there is no connection between the two surprising government figures issued this past month. One points to a 20% decline in the number of ultra-Orthodox men enlisting in the army in 2018, compared with 2017, although the natural growth rate of the country’s ultra-Orthodox population averages 4% annually. The second piece of data indicates that residents of Israel’s five most populous ultra-Orthodox communities with the country’s highest poverty rates — Bnei Brak, Beit Shemesh, Beitar Ilit, Modi’in Ilit and Jerusalem — enjoy a longer life expectancy than could be expected given their socio-economic standing.

Researchers at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies attribute the good health and long life expectancy of the ultra-Orthodox communities to the social cohesion of this population group, which constitutes 11% of the population. This cohesion is distinctly obvious in the impressive support for the rabbis’ ban on military enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men and their refusal to expose their young to modern society by teaching them such subjects as math, science and English. In April, Haaretz columnist Rogel Alper described the ultra-Orthodox as “primitive." Responding to the article, ultra-Orthodox pundit Yisrael Cohen wrote, “More than a million Israeli citizens are completely certain that anyone living in Israel and denying the millennia-old tradition of our fathers, anyone who despises and undermines Jewish values, they are the primitive and ignorant.”

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