On a steamy May morning in the gritty town of Bnei Brak, just east of Tel Aviv, the topic of debate is idol worship. Hundreds of students at Ponevezh Yeshiva are pondering whether a wig made with ritually shorn hair from a Hindu temple in India may be worn by an observant Jewish woman.
Among the young men present is Eliezer Kirtzner, a bearded, bespectacled father of five who spends all day studying the Talmud. The 31-year-old didn’t perform military service and plans never to hold a job. He hopes other Israelis will do the same. “If the whole country were learning, we wouldn’t need an army,” he says. “God would watch over us.”
For decades, subsidies paid by the state of Israel have allowed ultra-Orthodox or Haredi men like Kirtzner to cloister themselves inside seminaries such as this one. Black fedoras and jackets hang from pegs outside a study hall, while inside bearded men wearing white shirts, black trousers and black skullcaps, prayer fringes hanging from their waists, sway as they debate the same questions their fathers and grandfathers did.
