By Miri -
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Jerusalem's streets during Ovadia's funeral |
Last week an estimated
800,000 people gathered in Jerusalem to mourn the death of Rabbi
Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel's Sephardic community,
turning the event into the largest funeral in Israeli history.
Ovadia is considered to be
one of the greatest rabbinical scholars in recent history, yet his
influence clearly reached beyond the religious realm. He instilled
the hitherto disenfranchised Sephardic community with pride and
represented them politically in the Shas party, which under his
leadership rose to be the kingmaker in the Israeli parliament; during
the last few decades only two governments were formed without the
ultra-Orthodox party.
Obviously not everyone was
saddened by the death of Ovadia; his derogatory and often
inflammatory statements against “heathens”, i.e. people of
different beliefs, against gays, or simply against secular Israelis
made him a highly controversial and polarising figure, and to some
extent brought to light the increasing intra-religious tensions
between secular and religious Jews that 71% of Israelis believe to be the most acute societal conflict.
Israel's foundations are
largely secular, and Zionism in its original sense, was a political
ideology, promising redemption independently from religious
devotion.
Theodor Herzl, regarded as
the founding father of the Zionist movement, was an assimilated Jew,
who was solely interested in a political solution to the so called
"Jewish Problem", i.e. the anti-Semitism and
marginalisation of the Jews in Europe. According to Herzl the problem
could be solved through the creation of a Jewish sovereignty in a
land granted by the nations; Jewish culture and belief, on the other
hand, did not play a major role in his thinking or writing.
Similarly, early Labour-Socialist Zionism, based to a large extent on
a reformulation of Marxism, was an inherently secular movement.
Yet after the
establishment of the state in 1948, the secular leadership of Israel
felt it had to make some concessions to the ultra-Orthodox in order
to gain the support of their highly influential leaders. This
included the designation of Shabbat/Saturday as the official day of
rest, the requirement of all public institutions to obey to the
Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, the determination of marriage by
religious authorities and the exemption of religious seminary
students from military draft. This has become known as the status
quo, yet throughout the years it has also become the source of an
increasingly growing societal rift.
While the number of Jewish
Israelis describing themselves as secular has been decreasing in
recent years, the remaining “religious” Jews do not constitute
one uniform category and are usually broadly subdivided into Haredim
(ultra-Orthodox), national-religious, and traditional Jews.
While the latter two
categories perform their civic duties, join the work force and are usually regarded as
having accommodated their religiosity with a modern lifestyle, it is
the Haredi community that is usually seen as the major adversary
against Israel's secular culture.
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Haredim clash with secular Jews in Beit Shemesh |
The mixed city of Beit
Shemesh, has in recent years become one of the major sites of the
battle between secular and Haredi Jews. Israeli newspapers described
in detail the harassment a religious girl and her mother had to
endure, due to the fact that the girl's clothing was not modest
enough according to some some Haredi youngsters. On buses women were
summoned to sit in the back in order to prevent contact between men
and women and the construction of a shopping centre was allegedly thwarted due
to repeated acts of vandalism through members of the Haredi
community. Ultra-Orthodox attempts to block traffic on streets in Jerusalem in order to keep cars from desecrating the Sabbath in the capital are by now already considered a weekly ritual.
While ultra-Orthodox
communities generally seem to be better organised, secular Israelis
also mobilised to protest what they regard as the imposition of
gender segregation and the exclusion of women from the public sphere
and boarded so called “kosher buses” in Jerusalem and other towns
in Israel. In Ramat Gan an action committee was founded in order to
prevent the perceived takeover of a neighbourhood through Haredim.
Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy even proclaimed that "what
nationalist Israelis do to the Arabs, the left does to the
ultra-Orthodox. There's no difference. Demonization, dehumanization,
scare tactics and the sowing of hatred".
Considering the different power relations between Jews
and Arabs, this is obviously an exaggeration, yet Levy does point to an important issue: the extent to which
the Haredi community is considered by secular Israelis as a threat to
Israel's future. Due to a much higher birthrate, with 10 children in
one family not being uncommon, statistics claim that 30% of Israel's
Jewish newborns these days are Haredi. These children will most
likely attend Haredi schools, which are subsidised by the state, yet
do not teach Israel's core curriculum. Rather than English or
science, they focus on studying Hebrew and sacred
texts, which will hardly prepare them to join the labour force.
Today
approximately half of the Haredi men do not work, but dedicate all
their time to studying the Torah and live off government stipends, a
great source of anger to the rest of the population. While rejecting
and often actively opposing mainstream Israel, it is claimed, they at
the same time rely on it for financial support. Many Israelis
therefore demand that public funding for Yeshivot and large families
should be reduced in order to encourage Haredi males to join the work
force.
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Haredim protest against military draft, Jerusalem, May 2013 |
Another important point of
contempt for secular Israelis is the exemption of Haredi men from
military draft. 83% of Israeli society believe that Yeshiva
students should "share the civic burden" and be obligated to serve either in the military or in
civil service. Recently a new
draft-reform bill was introduced, which stipulates that Haredim upon
reaching the age of 18 will be obligated to join the army. While not
implemented yet, the introduction of the bill was already met with
major protests by the Haredi communities.
It is hard to say who will
eventually come out on top in this conflict. Due to the great influence
that religious leaders, such as the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, exert
over large parts of the Jewish religious (not only ultra-Orthodox)
population, it has been claimed that many governments bowed to the
pressure of the Haredim. In the last elections, however, the
ultra-Orthodox Shas was replaced by the national religious Habayit
Hayehudi (“the Jewish Home”), to form the new government. Due to Habayit Hayehudi's modern approach to religion and their plans to integrate the Haredim into the work force and the army,
this change was received positively by a large part of Israel's
secular society. From a left wing point of view the party's extreme right wing ideology does definitely not inject hope for a better future.
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