Jerusalem daycare deaths put spotlight on longstanding gaps in Haredi early childhood care |
In the hours after two babies tragically lost their lives in an unlicensed and overcrowded daycare facility in the largely ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Romema on Monday, top Haredi politicians were quick to point fingers.
Members of both the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism party and the Sephardic Shas blamed the deaths on the attorney general’s cancellation of daycare subsidies for fathers who don’t serve in the army in July, following a 2024 High Court decision designating draft exemptions for Haredi men as illegal.
Yet, the existence of unlicensed facilities, unqualified personnel, and a lack of adherence to educational and security standards for babies and toddlers has plagued the Haredi community, and Israel as a whole, since long before the current school year.
“Early childhood education is a real challenge for all Israeli society because Israel is a very young country with a great number of children, but especially for the Haredi community, which tends to have very big and very poor families,” said Dr. Shlomit Shahino Kesler, senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute’s Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel Program.
“According to research we conducted in 2022, only 32% of [Haredi] families send their children to licensed, subsidized daycare, so this is not a problem from the last few months. It goes way back,” she told The Times of Israel over the phone.
The State of Israel offers free education to children ages 3 and up. In 2018, a new law placed the Education Ministry in charge of child care for infants and toddlers aged 0-3.
The ministry runs a number of subsidized daycares, which are chronically insufficient. In addition, it requires private daycares with more than six children to obtain a license, while small facilities with fewer than six children are unregulated. For the 2025-2026 school year, the monthly fee for a private daycare could easily reach NIS 5,000 ($1,580).
In 2022, the state comptroller published a report about 0-3 education based on data from 2020 and 2021. According to the report, of the almost 550,000 children under 3, only about 150,000, or 27%, attended a subsidized public daycare, with another 35% in private daycares and 38% kept at home.
The report highlighted that the lack of spots for children was especially dramatic in cities and towns lower on the socioeconomic scale, and particularly in ultra-Orthodox and Arab localities.
In the city of Jerusalem, for example, in 2021, there were about 70,000 children under........