Israel’s Old-Time Religion

[rug]

How government policies have caused the surge in ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel—and why it’s an economic disaster.

By Gershom Gorenberg|Posted Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011, at 7:12 AM ET

The following is adapted from Gershom Gorenberg’s new book The Unmaking of Israel. Read yesterday’s excerpt about why, exactly, Israel ended up losing most of its Arab population in 1948.Tomorrow, Slate will publish a final excerpt about how Israel can resolve its tragic crisis with the Palestinians.

I'm standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone-faced building where Israeli novelist Amos Oz grew up in a small ground-floor apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to "petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons," as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—lighting Sabbath candles on Friday night, attending services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of secular Zionist ideology.

While I stand on the street, a flock of teenage girls walks by, dressed in blue blouses buttoned to the neck, pleated skirts, and high socks, so that no skin besides their faces and hands shows. A family passes, the husband in a circular, flat-topped black hat, his wife pushing a stroller, three more children younger than age 6 walking with them. The mother wears a wig, the common method for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) married women to hide their hair in modesty. On a cross street, I pass a kollel—a yeshiva where married men receive small salaries to study full-time.

Kerem Avraham today is one neighborhood in the haredi belt of northern Jerusalem, a land of wall posters denouncing television, Internet, and rival religious factions; of life-long Torah study for men and countless pregnancies for women; of schools that provide scant preparation for earning a living and no preparation at all for participating in a democratic society. The neighborhood began changing in the 1950s, after the rebellious young Oz moved to a kibbutz, which he left many years later.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2011/11/the_unmaking_of_israel_how_government_policies_have_caused_the_surge_in_ultra_orthodox_judaism_in_israel_.html

[GodlessBiker]

1. Good grief. Orthodox nuts of all kinds are coming out of the woodwork.