Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties had a terrible year. The new one could be worse

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On Yom Kippur last year, Israelis prayed in the streets. Observing the social-distancing rules while the second wave of COVID-19 swept across Israel, synagogues remained closed. It was a sobering time, but the scenes of thousands of Israelis – religious, traditional and secular – joining together in prayer and song in unexpected places like Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, in a rare moment of unity, were a rare ray of hope.

There was one place where the synagogues defiantly remained open. In the Haredi autonomy, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and towns, services took place indoors, often without masks or any form of separation (except the usual kind between men and women, of course). It was a stark sign of how a community comprising 13 percent of Israel’s population had detached itself from the rest of the country.

A few days later, after pressure from above, the police, who had largely abandoned any attempts to enter the Haredi areas, launched a perfunctory investigation into the prayers that had taken place in Jerusalem’s largest synagogue: the Beit Midrash of the Belz Hasidic sect, where over 10,000 men and boys had been packed in on Yom Kippur. It was a desultory affair that reached no conclusions. Instead of phoning the Belzer rov, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach, under whose direction the prayers had taken place, the police questioned journalists who reported on the event.

A year ago, the ultra-Orthodox community was untouchable. As crucial partners in Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, they arrogantly allowed themselves to flout the COVID lockdown, keeping synagogues and schools open, sacrificing thousands of their elderly members’ lives, as well as a disproportionate chunk of the public health resources.

It has to be said, of course, that they weren’t the only Israelis to break the rules. Many others, from all parts of society, have done so since the pandemic began. But the Haredim were the only part of Israeli society to defy those rules as a community, with the blessing and often the orders of their leaders, publicly challenging the government’s mandate to intervene in the Haredi autonomy’s affairs.

A trip to Ukraine

Ultra-Orthodox legislators Moshe Gafni, center, and Yitzhak Pindrus in the Knesset in June. Ohad Zwigenberg

Compare last year’s Yom Kippur to this year’s Rosh Hashanah, as pilgrims returned from Rabbi Nachman’s grave in Uman, a town in Ukraine where tens of thousands of religious men had gathered. When the first reports arrived that many pilgrims were falsifying the results of their COVID-19 tests to evade quarantine, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett immediately convened an emergency meeting and directed the police to crack down on them.

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The ultra-Orthodox politicians were outraged. Why didn’t Bennett act in a similar way against other passengers returning from abroad with false test results?

But they could do no more than fume. The year 5782 is a rare Jewish New Year, a year in which the ultra-Orthodox parties find themselves outside government and out of favor with the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public. In fact, that’s probably the most popular thing about the Bennett government – in a poll carried out in May, 60 percent of Israelis said that they wanted a government without the Haredim.

As the Haredi politicians, no longer ministers or heads of influential Knesset committees, spend their Yom Kippur in prayer and reckoning, will they spend any time considering how they brought this predicament on themselves?

The ultra-Orthodox parties were in government for 40 of the past 44 years, since Likud first came to power in 1977. They were members of the few left-wing and centrist governments formed in this period as well. They could have joined Bennett’s government as well, but they chose to join Netanyahu in the opposition instead, partly because they didn’t believe a government could be formed without him and them.

Not only were their combined efforts, their incantations and curses, their cries of “desecration of God’s name!” at Bennett futile in preventing this government, it was all their fault.

Back in April 2019, Netanyahu had a stable majority of 65 of the Knesset’s 120 legislators and was on the brink of swearing-in his new cabinet. But it was the Haredim’s hubris in refusing to countenance the bill on drafting yeshiva students into the army that gave Avigdor Lieberman the excuse he was looking for to pull his Yisrael Beiteinu party out of the coalition. Israel was dragged into three more election campaigns, and they were ultimately dragged out of power.

A member of the Haredi community offering his opinion to police officers after the disaster at Mount Meron in April.Rami Shllush

Kosher conundrum

Now they are facing a period where they have little influence over the level of funding for their separate education systems, while changes in legislation on matters dear to them such as kashrut (the system of certifying kosher food) and giyur (conversion) are already being drafted. They have been reduced to fulminating. As United Torah Judaism MK Yitzhak Pindrus screamed Monday in the Knesset: “If people won’t eat kosher in Israel, there will be terror attacks!”

Just about every time Haredi politicians argue in an interview in favor of the community’s continued monopoly over matters like kashrut supervision, Shabbat observance in public or preventing civil marriage, they’ll make some form of that argument that this is what “most of the people want.” But even allowing for their rather circumscribed view of who “the people” are – only Israeli Jews – surely they’ve seen the polls and know how to read them. If any of these issues – such as who gets to decide what’s kosher, should public transportation be allowed on Shabbat, or should couples be allowed the option of civil marriage – were ever put to a referendum, they know their position would lose, and badly.

They are professional politicians and are aware of this. But they’ve gotten used to making a political trade-off with the non-Haredi politicians who preferred to give them both their autonomy and control over wide swaths of Israeli life, in return for their votes. With Netanyahu it was especially easy, since despite his own secular way of life, he had zero interest in social affairs. As long as the Haredim kept him in power and allowed him full rein in security and diplomatic matters, they could have whatever they demanded.

As they do their Yom Kippur reckoning, will the Haredi leaders reach the conclusion that they need to change tack and find a different way of cooperating with the rest of Israel? Probably not. They’re more likely to think that their current exile from the levers of power is an aberration and pray for Netanyahu to make a swift comeback. He will restore them to their rightful place.

Even if the Netanyahu era is finally over, they will reckon that the next leader of Likud will renew the pact, and they may be right. But who knows what the contours of Israeli politics will be in the post-Netanyahu era? Three right-wing parties in the current coalition have already broken the alliance between the right and the ultra-Orthodox, and part of the next generation of Likud leaders may also think that the alliance with the Haredim is more trouble than it’s worth.

If the Haredi leaders make a real heshbon nefesh – a real reckoning – on Yom Kippur, they may realize that it goes beyond politics. Whether or not they’re in the coalition, their conduct over the past year has lost them the majority of Israelis – and that can’t be fixed by just another election.