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March 19, 1999/2 Nisan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 25
Fervently Orthodox, cities may face dire economic future
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part story on challenges confronting Israel's haredi community. Part two, in next week's Jewish News, will look at the rising number of fervently Orthodox serving in the Israeli army.
AVI MACHLIS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Rushing back to class along the twisting alleyways, a yeshiva student named Yishayahu breaks the midday quiet in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's fervently Orthodox neighborhood. Like most of his peers, the 24-year-old Yishayahu studies full time and does not work.
"None of the yeshiva students I know work," says Yishayahu, the father of two, sporting an other-worldly smile behind his reddish beard and sidelocks. "Making money in this world just isn't important to us. It's the world-to-come that really counts."
This sanguine attitude, shared by most in Israel's fervently Orthodox community, could lead to an economic crisis that may soon come crashing down on the serenity of a lifestyle devoted to tireless study. Economists who have studied the fervently Orthodox, or haredi, community, say the crisis could extend beyond the boundaries of Mea Shearim and similar sanctuaries to Israeli society as a whole, with increasing poverty and a growing strain on government funds.
Many haredi reject the doomsday scenarios, confident that pursuing a life of study is the ideal.
In 1997, Ruth Klinov and Eli Berman, economists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Boston University respectively, shocked Israeli economic experts with a study on Israel's labor force that revealed alarming data on the haredi community. According to the study, Israel has the lowest rate of work force participation in the developed world.
Non-participants are defined as people who either choose not to work or cannot work because of disabilities. They are not included in unemployment data, which only counts those who are actively seeking employment but cannot find a job. Israel's rate of participation in the work force for men between the ages of 25 and 54 fell from 93.5 percent in 1970 to 85.7 percent in 1993. In Western Europe and the United States, the rate was about 94 percent in the early 1990s.
Klinov says that the rapid growth of non-working yeshiva students accounts for about one-third of the decline. Indeed, other studies show that the number of haredi yeshiva students has doubled from 35,980 in 1990 to more than 72,000 in 1997 - 1.2 percent of Israel's population of 6 million.
The growth of the yeshivas coincides with the growing political power of the haredim and increased national funding for fervently Orthodox institutions. It also comes as Israel is struggling to revive its economy after a three-year slowdown. Economic officials say this can only be done by reducing the level of transfer payments, such as significant government support of yeshivas, and increasing public-sector investment in infrastructure projects that create jobs.
Israel's haredi community numbers some 350,000 today, or about 6 percent of the population. Berman says the population of Israel's fervently Orthodox community will double every 17 years.
Though birthrates in other sectors of Israeli society are slowing down, haredi families are having more babies than ever before. The average number of children per mother in the haredi community has climbed from 6.5 in the early 1980s to 7.6 in 1996. But the average monthly income for the family of a full-time yeshiva student is below the poverty line.
In Berman's newest study, "Sect, Subsidy and Sacrifice: An Economist's View of Ultra-Orthodox Jews," he writes: "The ultra-Orthodox growth rate will make Israel's welfare system insolvent and bankrupt municipalities with large ultra-Orthodox populations."
Jerusalem and B'nei Brak near Tel Aviv are the cities with the largest haredi populations.
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