The IDF on Thursday held a graduation ceremony in Modi'in for its second class of haredim who are continuing on the Hashmonaim battle unit track.
The first company of haredim in the Hashmonaim Brigade entered combat around five weeks ago, while Thursday's graduates still have another six months of more advanced combat training before they go into actual battle.
What is unique about the Hashmonaim Brigade is that those in the unit are still full-on haredim both inside and outside of the army, and are given special haredi measures, including at least an hour of learning Talmud every day.
For example, haredi officers and soldiers talked to the crown and separately to the Jerusalem Post about having finished the Talmud tractate of Ta'anit, which deals with fasting.
They said they would now start the Talmud tractate which deals with the fall holiday of Sukkot.
In contrast, the Netzach Yehuda unit, which some officials tried to portray as haredi in the past, was in reality a mix of religious Zionists and persons who came from haredi backgrounds, but were looking to leave the fold.
At an external level, this was often obvious from Netzach Yehuda graduation ceremonies where the families attending and supporting the soldiers were clearly not dressed as haredim, but more like religious Zionists.
However, at the Hashmonaim graduation ceremony, the overwhelming majority of family supporters attending were dressed as haredim, and all of the several family members who the Post spoke to confirmed that they are still fully within the haredi community.
Several of the haredi soldiers and their families who spoke to thePost said they were from Bnei Brak.
Others were from Modiin Illit, Ashdod, Elad, and other places.
Notably, none of those the Post spoke to were from the Jerusalem haredi neighborhood of Mea Shearim, and some of the soldiers who said they were proud to return in uniform to Bnei Brak said that they would not necessarily do so in Mea Shearim.
Another noteworthy aspect of the Hashmonaim Brigade is that they are expected to be highly trained infantry fighters, not IDF desk workers or even light infantry who are more limited to passive guard duty.
Soldier voluntarily surrendered himself to military jail
One of the soldiers who spoke to the Post, "S", related that he had wanted to join the IDF and Hashmonaim so much that he knowingly turned himself in to serve 12 days of military jail.
He was more than 20 years old and past the 540-day deadline of his original draft date by which he could have turned himself in without any major punishment.
At the earlier stages of his life, when S's draft notice was sent out, he had not yet come around to the idea of being haredi and serving in the IDF.
So at that stage, he had followed the common haredi approach of being a draft-dodger.
Given that the IDF rarely arrests draft-dodgers and only has a few hundred cells for them, compared to 80,000 haredim who are currently refusing to serve so far despite being eligible, if S had stayed away from the IDF, he probably would never have served a minute of jail time.
Only because he came forward, when his attitude had shifted and he wanted to serve, was he exposed to jail time.
S said that those 12 days were a small price to pay for getting to serve and fight for his country.
Other haredim who spoke to the Post noted that October 7 had changed their attitude toward the IDF.
Until then, they had seen the IDF and much of Israel as foreign to them and not relevant to their lives.
After October 7, some of them told the Post that they no longer felt they could avoid lending a hand to defend the country.
There were also some haredim who were second or third generation in serving in the military.
One grandfather of a haredi soldier said that he had served at a time when the army was "cleaner" – for example, there did not used to be women in combat units.
He would not have necessarily expected his grandson to join the current IDF, where women are much more mixed into many combat units.
IDF unit only includes men
But one issue which is unique about the Hashmonaim Brigade is that not only is the unit itself only made up of men – something which is true also of many more regular army religious Zionist Hesder yeshiva units – but even the IDF bureaucracy that deals with them is generally all men.
Only one male haredi soldier said that he had interacted with female soldiers extensively as part of his drafting process, but he also said that he had worked a job in between haredi yeshiva and the army, such that he had gotten more used to interacting with women than many haredim directly out of high school would be.
Another haredi soldier said that they were always able to request that bureaucracy be handled by male soldiers.
Y came from one of the few haredi hesder yeshivot such that he was already on his way to the IDF, but he still sought and received permission from his hesder rabbi to serve in the Hashmonaim combat unit specifically.
While some family members were supportive of their haredi children serving in the IDF without hesitation, many openly admitted they were not.
Some said that they were heavily opposed up until they realized their child was dead-set on serving in the IDF whether they liked it or not, and only then did they "give up" and show support so as not to lose their relationship with their child.
There were also haredi soldiers who said that some of their family members, often mothers, were supportive, while some of the soldiers' fathers had cut them off for joining the army.
Some haredim say they can return home to their neighborhoods with no problems, while others acknowledged that some community members will yell at them or rebuke them for joining the IDF.
None of the haredim the Post spoke to believed there would be an immediate wave of thousands of new haredim joining the IDF as opposed to the jump by some hundreds of new recruits.
Some said that if there were more dialogue and less public pressure and confrontation over the issue that they did believe many haredim who do not like studying in yeshiva that much would join the IDF.