Brandeis Visions for Israel in an Evolving World held an event on Tuesday about Israel's ultra-Orthodox population, called Haredim. The event brought together about 60 students and faculty.

The Haredi population is perceived by many Israeli citizens as absorbing state resources without paying proper duties to the state, including military service, participation in the labor force and proper care toward gender equality, according to program materials. Speakers during the event and students in a follow-up discussion examined the other side of this debate, considering how history led to Haredi dependence on the state, why Haredi ideology developed apart from the rest of Israel and how Haredim would be affected by changes to the legislation that currently supports them.

"Even if we are afraid of [this topic], the ultra-Orthodox are our partners," said bVIEW Co-Founder and Programming Director Gil Zamir '15 in his opening remarks. Citing statistics that 700,000 of Israel's eight million citizens are Haredi and that one in four Israeli children are educated at an ultra-Orthodox institution, Zamir emphasized that they are more than just a "parasite," a term he heard them called when growing up on an Israeli kibbutz. "We believe that when thinking about Israel's future we cannot disregard this topic, even if we are afraid of it," he said.

Prof. Yehudah Mirsky (NEJS), an ordained rabbi, and former Haredi Ysoscher Katz, director of a preparatory year program called Beit Midrash at the rabbinical school Yshivat Chovevei Torah, spoke at the event.

Mirsky discussed the history of the Haredi population, describing how their ideology developed into ultra-orthodoxy during the 20th century. Orthodoxy, which had developed into a myriad of groups, split between "the Old Yishuv," or "the old Jewish collective," and "the New Yishuv." The rise of the Zionist movement and the world wars that vindicated the Zionist cause enabled Zionists to determine the "agenda of Jewish political life," according to Mirsky. For this reason, "the old yishuv" was "never able on its own terms to attain a great position of leadership in the Jewish world," Mirsky said. The old Jewish collective, which developed into the ultra-Orthodox community, opposed the secularization of the most profound symbols of Jewish people and established its support from the state through the status quo agreements of 1947, which established their exemption from military service and arranged for them to receive funding for their institutions, according to Mirsky.

Ideological battles regarding the ultra-Orthodox in recent years, Mirsky said, have erupted in response to Israeli society becoming "remarkably secularized and sexualized." The "extraordinary bargaining power" ultra-Orthodox citizens had in the government allowed them to "negotiate almost anything," Mirsky said. Recent elections, however, have "for the first time in many years" removed Orthodox parties from the cabinet in the Israeli government, he added.

Katz's perspective on Haredim provided a different insight, as he had for most of his life been Haredi himself. "There is a logic and reason to their world," he said. Modernization in Israel has led there to be only two options available to traditionalists, he said: ultra-Orthodoxy or ultra-secularism. The two groups have not yet met "core-to-core," and instead have only encountered each other "periphery-to-periphery," causing the issue to be unresolved.

Regarding critiques of gender relations in ultra-Orthodox communities, Katz said that ultra-Orthodox communities were more complex than simply being "male-centric." The public face, he said, was male, but the private was dependent on women. Though his argument did not defend the system as being gender-equal, his defense of the ultra-Orthodox gender system depicted the system of dependency that appears to maintain unequal gender relations.

Shani Abramowitz '14, logistics director of bVIEW, clarified bVIEW's intentions in coordinating this event in an interview with the Justice.

"The point is to expose people to the other side of the narrative, because we're so quick to label and generalize, explicitly with [the Haredi] community and the discussion that surrounds it," said Abramowitz.

Chen Arad '15, one of bVIEW's co-founders, described the political situation that made the issue of Haredim particularly important to discuss. "There are no Haredi parties in the government right now," he said. "So they are not there to prevent ... cutting of budgets for Haredis if they don't join the military and all kinds of legislation that currently allows a high degree of not joining the military among Haredis."
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