MOMENT
What Will It Take to Get the Haredim to Enlist?
by Naomi Ragen
November/December 2018

…Ever since the nascent State of Israel agreed in 1948 in return for Orthodox support not to draft 400 yeshiva students—a number that by 2012 had risen to an astounding 58,000—the unequal sharing of the burden of military service has become an ever more toxic and explosive element in Israeli public life. In the 1980s, religious Zionists (in American terms, Modern Orthodox) voluntarily chose to obligate their yeshiva sons to join the army. Not so the haredim, who zealously guard their exemption and are deaf to all entreaties to compromise. READ MORE