An article in today’s Jerusalem Post was quite revealing. We are witnessing in our time the Nolad of the policies of the Yeshiva world. The poverty in the Torah world in Israel is now at epidemic proportions. Families are growing exponentially with every successive generation and income is nearly non existant. Jobs for the unskilled are the best a family head can hope for since he has no learned skills or professional training. And the old “fallback” of relying on help from working parents is no longer tenable. That’s because the current parents aren’t working either. They are in the same boat of no preparation for the workforce having themselves been victims of the Yeshiva system. They can at best work at menial jobs that pay a very low wage while having very large families to support.
This is what recent research conducted by the Economic and Social Program at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute points to. So what will be the answer to this situation from Charedi leadership? If history is any indicator it will be silence... silence plus complaining that the government doesn’t provide enough help to the poor and indigent. There is no attempt at all to change the status quo which is the real source of the problem. There is only resistance to innovations in the Charedi curriculum in the high schools that might make their situations better. So far any real attempt to introduce secular subjects that would help prepare young Charedi men for Parnassa has been rebuffed by Charedi Rabbinic leadership. Is the desire to keep the Yeshiva environment “pure and pristine” any kind of legitimate justification for producing a Torah nation of dire poverty? I don’t think so and the chickens are now coming home to roost.
Thanks to Marty Bluke for pointing this article out to me.
