Haredi rabbis push English-speakers to dodge IDF draft, worried they might join up |
On July 9, hundreds of members of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community gathered at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery to accompany one of their own to his final resting place.
Two days earlier, Moshe Shmuel Noll, a 21-year-old member of the IDF’s Netzach Yehuda battalion serving in Gaza, had been killed along with four other troops in a roadside bombing.
Speaking at the funeral, Noll’s older sister Gila said her brother had “loved our nation with all your heart, and no matter how dangerous it was, you knew this is what you had to do.”
That “sense of mission,” in her words, stands largely at odds with the overwhelming opposition to military service in the mainstream Israeli Haredi community, whose leadership is currently pushing for legislation exempting full-time yeshiva students from conscription.
But it’s an approach shared by many English-speaking ultra-Orthodox immigrants and their anglophone offspring.
Noll’s parents, ultra-Orthodox Jews affiliated with the Chabad Hasidic movement, had moved to Israel from South Africa over two decades ago. When he was killed, the family was living in Ramat Beit Shemesh A, a bedroom community in the hills west of Jerusalem that is both a major Haredi stronghold and home to a large number of English-speaking families with roots in the US, Canada, UK, Australia or South Africa.
That mix means that, more than many other ultra-Orthodox communities, the sight of uniformed soldiers wearing black velvet kippas is not uncommon in Ramat Beit Shemesh A.
But while some prominent rabbis have embraced enlistment and pushed for the establishment of ultra-Orthodox service tracks, others see the willingness of members of their community to join up as a threat to their shared way of life, which is predicated on successfully separating from mainstream society.
On Tuesday night, not far from where the Noll family’s home is, several of those rabbis took to the stage at an event billed as helping English speakers “to deal with the threats and temptations of the IDF against the Haredim.”
Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted, relying on the continuation of longstanding exemptions afforded the community but deemed illegal by a court ruling last year.
The Israel Defense Forces has long attempted to encourage ultra-Orthodox enlistment, including by........