A funny thing happened in the Knesset last week: Lawmakers approved in a preliminary vote a bill submitted by Moshe Gafni, the leader of the United Torah Judaism party, that would require public sector employers to hire a fixed quota of ultra-Orthodox workers.
The funny part is that Haredi leaders have for years done everything they can to deter their followers – at least the men – from finding gainful employment. In the “society of learners” that has grown and developed since the 1980s, the ideal for adult men is to study Talmud as late into life as possible.
The result is that the percentage of adult male Haredim in the Israeli workforce was just 51 percent in 2021, compared with 86 percent for non-Haredi men.
One serious consequence of the ideal of Torah study is to consign the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel to extraordinarily high rates of poverty: In 2021, about 39.7 percent of the community lived under the poverty line, more than three times the rate among non-Haredi Jews, according to the National Insurance Institute.
But any serious efforts by the government to alleviate the problem by encouraging the young men to serve in the army (where they could acquire skills and better integrate into Israeli society) or require Haredi...
Hyderabad: BRS leader Aedla Sudhakar Reddy strongly criticised the statements of HYDRAA commissioner A.V. Ranganath regarding the status of Bathukammakunta. The official had claimed that the place...