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.
Decimated by the Nazis, Haredim—the term means “those who tremble before God”—made up just a tiny minority of the population at Israel’s founding in 1948. The expectation was that they would quickly become an historic relic, replaced by Zionism’s new Jew—tough, self-sufficient and worldly.
“When I was 8, my father took me to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim and said, ‘Look closely, because they won’t be here when you grow up,’” recalls former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, now 75.
It’s hard to imagine a less prescient statement. Today, Kirtzner and the almost 200,000 men and boys like him are at the center of an anguished and urgent national debate: With their large families and profoundly anti-modern ways, will the Haredim drive this prosperous country into theocratic penury?
Two ultra-Orthodox parties are key partners in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right governing coalition. They recently secured massive increases in subsidies for their constituents, as inflation gnaws at many Israelis fed up with supporting men who don’t work.
Speaking of the ultra-Orthodox, Dan Ben-David, an economist who leads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, says, “this is Israel’s most severe threat since its War of Independence,” which is how many Israelis refer to the 1948 Israeli-Arab War. “The analogy with war is not an idle one. We don’t know how this will end.”
The Haredim make up only 13.5% of the population, yet their numbers are growing at more than double the rate of other Jewish Israelis, despite a sizable drop in fertility rates over the past decade and a half as more Haredi women enter the workforce. Today, 1 in 4 first graders is ultra-Orthodox, raising questions about how a society with a significant portion of the citizenry shunning paid employment will support itself down the road.
As Israel struggles to define what constitutes a Jewish democracy, the ultra-Orthodox are becoming more assertive. Netanyahu’s government includes seven ultra-Orthodox ministers—a record number. Once preoccupied solely with matters affecting their own, Haredi elected officials are now advocating policies that affect all of society, including limits on the Supreme Court’s powers, gender segregation in public places and rollbacks on protections for LGBTQ people. In another break with history, instead of shunning politics, many young ultra-Orthodox are aligning themselves with hard-line nationalists who want to annex the West Bank and limit the rights of Israeli Arabs, among other things, nudging their leaders’ politics in that direction.
Haredi political leaders and cabinet ministers declined requests for comment for this article. In public statements, they’ve denied their stance has changed.
Tensions between the ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis have never been higher. This is partly because the news these days is full of examples of ultra-Orthodox encroachment. In some pharmacies and grocery stores in religious neighborhoods, stickers block out women’s faces on shampoo bottles so as not to offend customers. An 11-year-old girl is benched when her coed basketball team plays one that’s all Orthodox boys. On a bus route in Bnei Brak, back-row seats are segregated by sex, despite laws that explicitly bar the practice.
As part of their coalition agreement with Netanyahu’s Likud party, the ultra-Orthodox parties want the government to mandate separate areas for men and women at public events, require modest dress for women at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and make insulting the religious the equivalent of a hate crime. And, in a reminder that there’s no such thing as trivial in politics, they pushed a law permitting hospitals to ban bringing in bread during Passover.
The parties had historically avoided making such demands, because the rabbis didn’t want to be seen as imposing themselves on the rest of society. “Now they are saying, ‘You should make public spaces appropriate for us’ instead of vice versa,” says Gilad Malach, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem.
The ultra-Orthodox retort is that for decades Israel’s secular majority has been content to have the government generously subsidize sport stadiums, museums and universities that the Haredim never set foot in, while providing only modest study pensions to the Haredim. They also say that historically their schools have been underfunded.
The push for a judicial overhaul, backed by the ultra-Orthodox, has prompted tens of thousands of secular Israelis to take to the streets weekly for six months, the biggest such protests in the country’s history. But the focus of the demonstrations has begun to shift to the entire political agenda of the ultra-Orthodox, especially after the legislature approved a budget in late May that grants an unprecedented $3.5 billion in spending for religious communities over two years.
At the marches that have become a Saturday ritual in the country’s biggest cities, thousands of women have donned the red capes and white bonnets of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, walking with heads bowed and hands clasped to signal that their rights are in peril.
The Haredim say the hostility is pure politics, arguing that if their parties had joined those of the left and center to prevent Netanyahu from forming a government after the November elections, their critics would have hailed them as heroes. “They wanted us to become more Israeli, less insular,” says Yisrael Cohen, a Haredi teacher and journalist in Bnei Brak. “We did. But we became the wrong kind of Israeli for them. We joined with the right.”
For many Haredim, self-segregation isn’t the goal but a means to an end: staying focused on what matters, which is love of Torah, God and community. That’s how Yitzi and Avigayil Ackerman view it. In their mid-30s, they have six children and live in a sparsely furnished second-floor apartment in Modiin Illit, a Haredi settlement in the West Bank, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The Ackerman home has no television. The couple have cellphones and a computer but the devices’ access to the internet is restricted. Oil paintings depicting Jewish life in Poland centuries ago hang on a wall near the entrance. Hundreds of religious books fill a huge case, spines of magenta, black and gold behind glass doors.
“The more materialistic you are, the more you have holding you to this world,” says Yitzi. “This life is not supposed to be comfortable; it is only the corridor to the next,” adds Avigayil.
The affairs of this world are becoming difficult to ignore, however. Modiin Illit, which has 75,000 inhabitants, all of them ultra-Orthodox, lies just inside the West Bank. In other words, it is on occupied territory that in a peace deal might be handed over to the Palestinian Authority or swapped for land elsewhere in Israel.
While traditional Haredi ideology rejects settling occupied land, a growing number of ultra-Orthodox are, in effect, integral to the settlement movement and won’t be easily dislodged in the name of peace. In November’s elections, about 7% of Haredim voted for parties like those led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, ministers on the far right of Netanyahu’s coalition who reject the concept of a Palestinian state and hope to annex the West Bank.
Menachem Starck, a 25-year-old student of Jewish history, grew up in an ultra-Orthodox home in Jerusalem without television. As a teenager, he took an interest in politics. He served in the military. Today he’s an activist for ultra-nationalist parties that take their inspiration from Meir Kahane, an American-born rabbi who called for the expulsion of all Arabs and the establishment of a state based on Jewish religious law. Kahane used to say that the difference between him and most Zionists was that he wanted a Jewish state, whereas they wanted a Hebrew-speaking Sweden.
Starck likes that distinction. “I had ambivalence about embracing Zionism, since it was founded by secular Jews,” he says. “But the more I read, the more I saw how the Torah also talks about the land. I see the Arab community here as my enemy. I have a very strict idea about who has the right to live on our land.”
Like many ultra-Orthodox, Starck says the Supreme Court has demonstrated it is prejudiced against his people by barring gender segregation in religious communities, striking down a law exempting yeshiva students from military service and protecting Arab rights.
Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosopher at Hebrew University who grew up in a Haredi family, says that in all the tensions, much of what’s admirable about the Haredi way of life—as captured in the hit television series Shtisel—gets lost in this debate. “They’ve rejected consumer society,” he says, “They’re devoted to Torah. Their communities are exemplars of solidarity. There’s immense poverty without crime.”
As they become more integrated into state power, these values are threatened, just as Israel’s wealth and security appear to be at risk, Halbertal says. “This is a moment of reckoning. Their changes are accelerating an unraveling of Israeli society.”Read next: An Aggressive Supreme Court Is Reshaping the US as Its Standing Erodes
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