Israel’s government is doing “everything” it can to extend the exemption for yeshiva students from IDF service, Shas chairman MK Aryeh Deri said in an interview published on Monday in the Shas-affiliated newspaper Haderech.
Deri said that “despite it being difficult at this time to find a legal and agreed-upon solution,” he was acting according to the orders of Shas’s spiritual leaders “to make every effort so that a son of Torah, whose soul yearns for Torah study without exception, can study Torah without quotas or restrictions.”
According to Deri, those who were attempting to force yeshiva students to enlist in the IDF were “miserable” and did not understand the power of Torah study.
He added that “from a budget perspective, every day of battle costs us more than the annual budget of the entire world of Torah… and we believe that every day of study prevents another day of battle.”
The legal exemption for yeshiva students from IDF service ended in July 2023, and the High Court of Justice issued a permanent order in June 2024 that as long as there was no new legislation on the matter, all military-aged haredi men were under the obligation to report for duty. Estimates in June were that there were over 60,000 such men.
The Attorney General’s Office added to the ruling that the state could also no longer issue financial incentives for the haredi to continue with their studies instead of reporting for service. These include subsidies for daycare of children aged zero to three in families where one parent worked and the other studied, including in a yeshiva, state payments that yeshivot receive per student, and more.
Restore financial benefits for yeshiva students
Deri said that the legislation that the government was attempting to formulate would not just ensure that yeshiva students would be allowed to continue studying but that these financial benefits would also be restored.
IDF representatives have said in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in recent months that the military needs an estimated 10,000 more combat soldiers to adequately fulfill its missions in the long term. However, the IDF said that the maximum number of haredi it could incorporate in the coming year is approximately 5,000. The government has attempted to pass other measures, such as prolonging regular and reserve IDF service, to increase its human resources.
Opposition leader MK Yair Lapid said in a press conference in Tel Aviv on Monday that his party had formed a team led by MK Vladimir Beliak (Yesh Atid) to ensure that the government does not attempt to fund yeshiva students of military age in other ways.
Lapid claimed that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) had promised the haredi parties hundreds of millions of shekels from the welfare and education budgets in exchange for their support for the 2025 budget. The opposition leader said that this was “intended to ensure that they can evade IDF service while continuing to receive money.
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