The new haredim

There are growing signs that younger ultra-Orthodox are no longer prepared to live behind the defensive barricades erected by rabbinic leaders

By ANDREW FRIEDMAN
IDF soldiers of the Netzah Yehuda Haredi infantry battalion are seen during their swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem (photo credit: REUTERS)
IDF soldiers of the Netzah Yehuda Haredi infantry battalion are seen during their swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem
(photo credit: REUTERS)
AT FIRST glance, there is little to distinguish Moshe Levy (not his real name) from the other residents of his neighborhood in an ultra-Orthodox city in Israel.
He wears a black suit with a velvet kippa, attends synagogue services three times every day in addition to his Talmud study sessions, and keeps a strictly kosher home. His children have been educated in some leading Haredi yeshivas and Beit Yaakov seminaries for girls.
But there is a family secret that Levy feels he cannot discuss with any of his neighbors, but only with his closest friends.
“My son would like to serve in the IDF. My wife and I support him ‒ it is clear to my wife and I that he is not cut out for full-time Torah learning, and we think that serving in the army would be good for him,” Levy tells The Jerusalem Report.
“But, quite frankly, we are scared,” he says. “There are many attacks against young men from our neighborhood who do serve ‒ soldiers are often subjected to verbal abuse as they make their way home in uniform, often by young children.
More than a few people have had rocks thrown at them, and one career officer who lives in our town even had feces smeared on his front door, and vicious graffiti spray-painted on the wall of his house.
If the picture that Levy describes seems extreme, it should be noted that ferocious denunciations of the Zionist state and the attempts to encourage Haredim to contribute to society are commonplace in the Haredi world. Ultra-Orthodox demonstrations against Haredi conscription routinely feature individuals dressed in concentration camp uniforms.
Nor are Haredi politicians exempt from the venom of the community they represent. Following a Knesset vote in late November to push off implementation of a law setting enlistment targets for the ultra-Orthodox world, one Haredi newspaper, Hapeles, published a banner headline decrying a “black day for Haredi Judaism” because the United Torah Judaism and Shas parties “only” managed to get the measure delayed by 10 years, rather than demanding its complete annulment.
“Something terrible happened today in Israel,” said the paper. “The current government, with the support of the Haredi parties, ratified a decision to destroy 22 THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 28, 2015 Israel the Jewish people” by agreeing on target numbers for yeshiva students to enlist in the IDF. This issue is not negotiable. We have been commanded to oppose IDF service for yeshiva students, even to the point of giving up our lives,” the newspaper wrote.
Hapeles represents the “official” Haredi position of at least one wing known as the Jerusalem Faction. With a stamp of approval from the faction’s 86-yearold leader, Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, the newspaper pushes a hard-line stance against cracks in traditional Haredi positions, which include full-time Talmud study for men, a rejection of secular studies, and no room for concessions to the State of Israel or many other areas of modern life.
IDF service is simply out of the question, as are modern contraptions such as the Internet or text-messaging technologies.
In short, the paper supports a ferocious commitment to maintain the protective walls the Haredi world has erected to keep out modernity in an attempt to maintain their religious standards.
What remains to be seen, however, is the degree to which the Haredi world is actually bowing to the fury of extreme protesters, or to the demands of leaders like Auerbach. To be sure, the views of leading rabbis hold a lot of sway in a community that venerates not only Torah knowledge, but also the wisdom that comes with old age.
But in real terms, there are growing signs that younger ultra-Orthodox are no longer prepared to live behind the defensive barricades erected by rabbinic leaders and accepted by their parents and grandparents. Currently, more than 5,000 Haredim serve in the IDF in a variety of combat, technology, combat support and administrative roles. Whereas the Haredi political leadership has openly fought attempts to change the status quo between the ultra-Orthodox and the state, the numbers of Haredim who do serve has been quietly, but steadily increasing for more than a decade.
“The extreme incidents like the reaction from Hapeles are a sign of panic inside the Haredi community and with good reason. The current system is simply not sustainable,” Rabbi Bezalel Cohen tells The Report. Cohen, 40, is a graduate of leading Haredi yeshivas and the founder of Chachmei Lev, an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva high school in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem, which offers Israel matriculation courses in addition to traditional Torah study.
Cohen says that after growing up in the heart of the Haredi world, he was on the way to becoming a senior educator, a role that could easily have led him to a position of leadership in the community. But as he looked around Haredi society and the yeshivas in which he studied, he eventually realized two things: First, the “society of learners” model is simply not for everybody, and second, the economics of the current system were unsustainable.
“You don’t read too much about this, but there is a phenomenal percentage of drop-outs from the Haredi world ‒ perhaps as much as a third of all young people.
Partly, this is due to financial issues ‒ don’t forget, by the age of 25, most people are married with a child or two and trying to get by on a small kolel (yeshiva for married men) stipend.
“But the financial issue is actually the lesser of the reasons for the high drop-out rate. The fact is that the model of full-time learning just isn’t for everybody. By the time boys are bar mitzva age, they have essentially stopped general studies. In yeshiva ketana [the Haredi phrase for high school], morning prayer services are held at 7:00 or 7:30, and much of the rest of the day is spent studying alone. It’s very, very intense, with a lot of alone time, and there is a huge wave of kids who drop out at this stage.
“Later, another large group of people drop out, when they move on to yeshiva gedola [post-high school yeshiva]. It’s too much for many people ‒ we are losing as many as one-third of our kids. We simply have to give them other options,” Cohen says.
To answer that need, Cohen founded Chachmei Lev in 2012, mainly to provide an educational framework that would imbue students with a strong religious education and install Haredi values, but also teach secular subjects to prepare students for matriculation exams.
Previously, he was a research fellow at Jerusalem’s Mandel Leadership Institute, writing on issues related to changes in the Haredi world such as employment trends and IDF service.
But in 2012, the issue hit close to home.
One of his sons was “well on the way” to dropping out of Orthodoxy.
“It was natural for me to start Chachmei Lev ‒ I’d been dealing with economics and social issues for a long time. But when my second son needed something different ‒ he wasn’t thriving inside the Haredi system as early as 7th grade ‒ I started looking into the education side of it more.
“To me, it’s a simple equation: The moment the Haredi world doesn’t allow for any future for its young people, people will simply leave. And that’s what’s happening.
And people aren’t stupid ‒ they see what is going on with their parents and they ask a lot of questions about Judaism, science, the State of Israel, the outside world. If they don’t get answers to their questions, they will make their own decisions.
“So, I’m worried. I see my job ‒ our job ‒ to give a sane Haredi alternative ‒ not in order to undo the Haredi world, but davka to preserve it. It’s really a pretty simple choice at this stage. If the conservative standpoint wins out, we will all lose. Our only chance not to lose Haredi youth is to give them a sane alternative to the defensive ‘society of learners’ model, and quickly,” Cohen says.
ECONOMICS ASIDE, perhaps the greatest challenge facing the ultra-Orthodox world today is the Internet. For years, Haredi leaders fought tooth and nail against television, which they viewed as an uncontrolled window to the outside world with serious breaches in Haredi standards of modesty.
But as letter writing gave way to email in the mid-1990s, and email yielded to Facebook and Twitter a decade later, and Leading rabbis and ultra-Orthodox politicians remain committed to the notion that the community is immune to change more recently to text-messenger applications, the lure of the Internet simply proved too strong for the Haredi leaders who tried to replicate previously successful tactics to keep it out. A generation earlier it had been relatively easy to keep television out because TVs were so big and noisy that they couldn’t easily be hidden, whereas the Internet on cell phones fit easily in a pocket or handbag.
Not that many sectors of the ultra- Orthodox leadership haven’t tried. For example, in 2012, a Monsey, New Yorkbased group called the Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp raised $1.5 million to rent two local sports stadiums for a rally protesting the “evils of the Internet and the damages caused by advanced electronic devices.” The two events were attended by more than 60,000 people who heard US and Israeli rabbis denounce the Internet “enemy” and plead with followers to resist “the onslaught of technology.”
But even that was streamed live on the Internet, turning the event into something of a joke. Today, despite pleas from leading rabbis in publications like Hapeles, as well as pashkevilim (wall posters, a common form of communication in Haredi neighborhoods), hundreds of thousands of Haredim maintain an active online presence. Hebrew-language news websites like Kooker, Kikar Shabbat and Bechadrey Haredim are no less active than their secular counterparts. Some 40,000-50,000 people are connected to the Avodot LeHaredim (Work for Haredim) Facebook group.
Same for cell phone technology. Despite an “official” requirement for Haredim to own “kosher” phones that cannot send text messages or access the Internet, several individuals interviewed for this article agreed that “most people” in their communities have at least two phones ‒ a “kosher” one (without Internet or texting capabilities) to maintain outward appearances, and a smartphone to surf the Internet, keep updated on Facebook and send text messages. On WhatsApp, Avodot LeHaredim currently has about 70 active groups, with about 4,000 people involved.
“Anyone who says nothing has changed in our world is either stupid or blind,” Avigdor Rabinovitch, the 25-year-old founder of Avodot LeHaredim tells The Report. “A lot of people want to imagine that nothing has changed in our community, but they are simply disconnected from reality. The plain fact is that many, many Haredi young people want to have careers, don’t want to get married too early, etc.
“Two years ago, after I’d been working for several years, I felt the need to branch out in order to help the community. Because I was working, many people came to me asking if I could help them find work. So I saw an opportunity to link job seekers with potential employers, and the project took off immediately. As soon as we opened the Facebook group, we were inundated with requests for help, and it’s all grown exponentially since then,” Rabinovitch adds.
This does not mean that the individuals involved are interested in throwing off their ultra-Orthodox backgrounds.
Rabinovitch lives in the heart of one of Jerusalem’s biggest Haredi neighborhoods, makes sure to pray with a minyan three times a day and maintains a regular schedule of Torah study.
Others wear white shirts, black pants and black velvet kippot and discuss the weekly Torah portion over a beer at a men-only Jerusalem hangout called Zula al HaGag. Virtually all the young people interviewed for this article spoke passionately about the satisfaction they derived from a religious lifestyle and the positive values they’d grown up with.
They stressed that a growing openness to the outside world has not altered their fundamental Torah worldview.
STILL, FOR a community that has been largely based on limiting the flow of information, the internet is a game changer.
Rabbi Dovid Neustadt, head of the Council of Orthodox Rabbis of Greater Detroit and a former head of the rabbinic steering committee for the widely read Orthodox Mishpacha magazine, once told me that Haredim “know what the reality is in the world, but we like to pretend that things are different. We in the Haredi media portray the world the way we like to imagine it is, and only things that fit into that imaginary reality are going to go into this magazine.”
Today, however, that approach is essentially over. The exposure Haredi young people now have to secular music, history, science, unlimited lifestyle choices and especially to a wide variety of expressions of Judaism has forced thousands of young Haredim to challenge the monolithic education they received in traditional frameworks.
Perhaps most significant is the unfettered ability to learn about non- Haredi approaches to Orthodoxy that allow for secular education, IDF service, and successful careers, while also maintaining the same halakha-centric lifestyle they grew up with.
“One can still be Haredi in the age of the Internet,” says Bezalel Cohen. “But Haredi after the Internet is not the same as Haredi before the Internet.”
Cohen says there are four main elements to what he calls the “Haredi self-renewal”: Total commitment to Torah study and the careful performance of mitzvot; a desire to help nurture and look up to Torah authorities; a continued rejection of Zionism as “the first flowering of redemption;” and social conservatism.
“Especially in such turbulent times, tradition is very, very important. The fact that I dress, eat and pray like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather is not insignificant. I like them, speak like them, etc. This is the sociological element,” he says.
As a result of these contradictions, however, the Haredi world today finds itself in a difficult conundrum. In many ways, the community is essentially leaderless.
Although many people, including virtually all public figures, pledge unswerving commitment to leading rabbis ‒ in fact prominent rabbis such as Aharon Leib Steinman, a leader of the Degel Ha- Torah political party, who exerts much power in the United Torah Judaism coalition, and Shmuel Auerbach and others appear to have virtually no influence on the Haredi street.
There are several reasons for this. For one, there is a vast generational gap – Steinman is 102 years old, meaning the Haredi teenagers are young enough to be his great-great grandchildren; Auerbach, at 86, is relatively young in terms of Haredi rabbinic leaders.
On a more substantive level, the rabbis have largely pulled out of the public discussion about issues of the day. “It isn’t just that the Haredi rabbinate has relinquished its role as leaders of the community.
The leaders are actually petrified of the Haredi street,” Rabbi Dov Lipman, a social activist in Ramat Bet Shemesh and a former MK for the Yesh Atid party, tells The Report.
“They are actually being led by the street. One rabbi ‒ a very senior yeshiva head ‒ called me one day a few months ago and asked for a meeting.
But he wouldn’t let me meet him at the yeshiva ‒ having me walk into the yeshiva building could be ting our first term in office, but he was too scared of the street to put his name on any sort of a statement, or even to meet me except under the strictest secrecy. That means there truly is a complete lack of leadership in the Haredi world,” Lipman asserts.
If there appears to be a cultural war going on between conservative and progressive elements in the Haredi world, it is far from certain that the future lies in the hands of the moderates. In the 2013 Jerusalem municipal elections, Haredi parties received more than 100,000 votes compared to less than 1,500 votes for an upstart “liberal” Haredi party. In contrast to Chachmei Lev’s 70 or so students, traditional Haredi yeshivas in the city have many thousands of school-age children.
Leading rabbis and ultra-Orthodox politicians remain committed to the notion that the community is immune to change. “Change? The Haredim are the same Haredim we’ve been for the past 3,000 years,” said one person in an offthe- record conversation.
It’s a comment that elicits a short laugh from Rabinovitch. “United Torah Judaism was supposed to have a representative of the working Haredim on their election list in March, but the party stuck him way down to ensure he didn’t get elected. So I wrote a Facebook status criticizing Dovid Shapira, an aide to Steinman, and it threatened the party leadership enough that Shapira invited me for a meeting.
“They can try to fool themselves all they want, but the reality is that change is coming ‒ to our politics, and especially to our society. The question is not whether these changes will happen, but rather how far they are going to go,” Rabinovitch says. Haredi after the Internet is not the same as Haredi before the Internet.
Cohen says there are four main elements to what he calls the “Haredi self-renewal”: Total commitment to Torah study and the careful performance of mitzvot; a desire to help nurture and look up to Torah authorities; a continued rejection of Zionism as “the first flowering of redemption;” and social conservatism.
“Especially in such turbulent times, tradition is very, very important. The fact that I dress, eat and pray like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather is not insignificant. I like them, speak like them, etc. This is the sociological element,” he says.
As a result of these contradictions, however, the Haredi world today finds itself in a difficult conundrum. In many ways, the community is essentially leaderless.
Although many people, including virtually all public figures, pledge unswerving commitment to leading rabbis ‒ in fact prominent rabbis such as Aharon Leib Steinman, a leader of the Degel Ha- Torah political party, who exerts much power in the United Torah Judaism coalition, and Shmuel Auerbach and others appear to have virtually no influence on the Haredi street.
There are several reasons for this. For one, there is a vast generational gap – Steinman is 102 years old, meaning the Haredi teenagers are young enough to be his great-great grandchildren; Auerbach, at 86, is relatively young in terms of Haredi rabbinic leaders.
On a more substantive level, the rabbis have largely pulled out of the public discussion about issues of the day. “It isn’t just that the Haredi rabbinate has relinquished its role as leaders of the community.
The leaders are actually petrified of the Haredi street,” Rabbi Dov Lipman, a social activist in Ramat Bet Shemesh and a former MK for the Yesh Atid party, tells The Report.
“They are actually being led by the street. One rabbi ‒ a very senior yeshiva head ‒ called me one day a few months ago and asked for a meeting.
But he wouldn’t let me meet him at the yeshiva ‒ having me walk into the yeshiva building could be ting our first term in office, but he was too scared of the street to put his name on any sort of a statement, or even to meet me except under the strictest secrecy. That means there truly is a complete lack of leadership in the Haredi world,” Lipman asserts.
If there appears to be a cultural war going on between conservative and progressive elements in the Haredi world, it is far from certain that the future lies in the hands of the moderates. In the 2013 Jerusalem municipal elections, Haredi parties received more than 100,000 votes compared to less than 1,500 votes for an upstart “liberal” Haredi party. In contrast to Chachmei Lev’s 70 or so students, traditional Haredi yeshivas in the city have many thousands of school-age children.
Leading rabbis and ultra-Orthodox politicians remain committed to the notion that the community is immune to change. “Change? The Haredim are the same Haredim we’ve been for the past 3,000 years,” said one person in an offthe- record conversation.
It’s a comment that elicits a short laugh from Rabinovitch. “United Torah Judaism was supposed to have a representative of the working Haredim on their election list in March, but the party stuck him way down to ensure he didn’t get elected. So I wrote a Facebook status criticizing Dovid Shapira, an aide to Steinman, and it threatened the party leadership enough that Shapira invited me for a meeting.
“They can try to fool themselves all they want, but the reality is that change is coming ‒ to our politics, and especially to our society. The question is not whether these changes will happen, but rather how far they are going to go,” Rabinovitch says.