Ultra-Orthodox confront an unfamiliar call to Israel’s army

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men protest against a Supreme Court order for them to begin enlisting for military service, in Jerusalem on June 30, 2024. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, exempt for decades from military service, are now being drafted. Their rage is dividing Israel and threatening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)

By Elisabeth Bullimer, Natan Odenheimer and Johnatan Reiss

It was 11 p.m. in Jerusalem, and one of the city’s most insular ultra-Orthodox communities was in a furor.

Hundreds of men in black suits and black hats of the Edah Haredit sect grew agitated as a top rabbi, shouting in Yiddish from a balcony, denounced the Israeli government for drafting the ultra-Orthodox. They had been exempt from military service to focus on religious study since the founding of Israel, but now they were needed for the war in the Gaza Strip.

A large fire blazed in the street, set by ultra-Orthodox protesters who had ignited a dumpster. Police officers on horseback tried to keep order as water cannons on trucks sprayed “skunk water,” a vile-smelling liquid, to disperse the crowd.

Outside the nearby Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest and most prestigious religious schools in the country, Haim Bamberger, 23, said he was studying the Torah, as, he said, God wanted. It was Bamberger’s way of defending Israel, rather than through military service. “When we do what he wants, he protects us,” he said.

The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and led to the taking of roughly 250 hostages, Bamberger said, “was partly because many people in this country are not doing what God wants.”

Bamberger said he had been drafted but was ignoring his notice and risking jail. He grew more animated as he spoke. “In this country I’m considered a criminal,” he said, “because I want to study Torah.”

Days later, Israeli military police began arresting ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers. Only a few have been detained so far, according to multiple Israeli news reports, but on Aug. 14, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protested and clashed with police outside a prison where the Ynet Hebrew news site reported that seven were held.

For now, at a time of rage among the ultra-Orthodox and building tension between the military and the government over Gaza, the military is holding off on mass arrests.

A Political Crisis

Military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women. The exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, known in Hebrew as Haredim, has long been resented by the rest of the Jewish population. But the nearly two-year war in Gaza has turned an irritant into a political crisis that is deepening divisions in Israeli society and imperiling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.

Last month, two ultra-Orthodox parties crucial to Netanyahu’s majority in parliament withdrew from the government after it did not pass legislation exempting the ultra-Orthodox from the draft. Their move could lead to the collapse of the prime minister’s coalition and early elections, although Netanyahu has survived far worse political threats.

“The war has pushed everything to an extreme,” said Nechumi Yaffe, a professor of public policy at Tel Aviv University who is ultra-Orthodox. Secular Israelis are asking, she said, “Why should our children die and your children are just sitting drinking coffee and learning?”

The policy dates to Israel’s beginnings in 1948, when David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s founding prime minister, granted the exemption to the 400 yeshiva students in the country at the time. Ben-Gurion envisioned their Torah study, which they believed would safeguard Israel from its enemies, as part of a revitalization of Jewish religious scholarship lost in the Holocaust.

But as the ultra-Orthodox population grew, the policy was extended, sparking backlash and legal challenges over many years. It did not help that the most extreme ultra-Orthodox sects were anti-Zionists who do not recognize the state of Israel because, they say, it was founded by secular Jews and not for a divine purpose.

In June 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court finally ruled in a landmark decision that without a formal law there was no legal basis for the exemption, and ordered the military to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men.

The military says it urgently needs 12,000 new recruits for a force exhausted by the war in Gaza. More than 450 Israeli soldiers have died in the enclave; suicides are on the rise; and fewer Israeli reservists, the bulk of the fighters, are reporting for duty. Many have spent more than 400 days in service since the war began.

The ultra-Orthodox are unmoved.

“It may be that the circumstances have changed and the times have changed,” Motti Babchik, the powerful political adviser to one of the ultra-Orthodox parties that left the government, said in an interview. “But the basic agreement between the Haredis and the state of Israel remains the same.”

‘Is Their Blood More Red?’

Rabbi Tamir Granot’s son Capt. Amitai Granot, 24, was killed by a Hezbollah missile on the border with Lebanon in October 2023, eight days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The following March, the rabbi delivered an impassioned speech, widely shared on YouTube, calling on the ultra-Orthodox to serve and share in the pain.

“Was Amitai wrong?” his father asked. “Is it for naught that he now lies under clumps of earth beneath Mount Herzl, he and all his comrades who lie there with him, and other cemeteries around Israel? Should they have stayed in yeshiva and left the army and self-sacrifice to secularists only?”

Granot is part of a different stream of Orthodox Judaism, religious Zionism, which is an integral part of Israeli society and sends large numbers of its yeshiva students to the military. In an interview at his Tel Aviv yeshiva, Granot recounted how he went to the homes of ultra-Orthodox religious leaders after his son’s death and tried to reason with them. He told them, he said, that he had students in his yeshiva — he called them his children — and, like his son, they knew they had to serve.

He posed a question to the Haredi leaders: “So why are your children better than them? Is their blood more red than our blood?”

Some leaders agreed that the ultra-Orthodox should serve, he said, but none would say so publicly. “One of the biggest told me, ‘I can’t do it.’ I asked him why. He told me, ‘If I will do it, I will not exist.’”

In other words, Granot said, “he will lose his status in society and everyone else from the leadership would say he’s not a rabbi.”

The issue has only intensified since then. Last month, in a video made public of an emergency meeting about the Haredi draft, Hillel Hirsch, a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi, unequivocally told a small group of colleagues that most Haredi yeshiva students do not want to serve. “They never dreamed of it; they don’t dream of it now,” he said.

‘Brother, We’re the Same People’

Rabbi Arie Amit, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, which is more inclined than other ultra-Orthodox groups to engage with the outside world, was among the first Haredim in Israel to enlist. It was 2001, he was soon to be 18, and the second intifada, a mass uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, had started the year before.

“I saw in the newspapers that people were blowing up in the streets, and I didn’t see myself studying Torah all day,” he said in an interview in a cafe in the city of Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “So I thought I could contribute to my people much better in the military.”

He now handles logistics at a temporary base just inside the Gaza border, and said he understood why so many Israelis were upset with the ultra-Orthodox.

“People are being killed, or people are serving many, many months,” he said. “It’s like: Brother, we’re the same people. Why aren’t you contributing to the burden that we’re carrying?”