The entrance of Jerusalem was blocked this Thursday by a tide of black and white: tens of thousands of men ultraortodoxos staged their largest demonstration in a decade in protest against their recruitment to serve as military serviceobligatory for the rest of the inhabitants of Israel.
The corridors and escalators of the city’s train station presented, since the morning, a picturesque landscape of white shirts, black suits, top hats, long beards and the characteristic ‘peyot’ (curly locks) of these religious people, who base their lives on the study of the Torah and live according to the strictest interpretation of Judaism.
Today, they make up between 10 and 15 percent of Israel’s population, a rising percentage due to their large number of children, and they enjoy certain privileges that the rest of the population does not have access to, including being exempt from military service, which in Israel is about three years for men and two for women.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that these exemptions – in force since the founding of the State of Israel – are illegal and the Army began sending recruitment orders this summer, but practically all the religious did not show up, without the vast majority having faced the consequences.
Now, the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu which governs in a minority after the two ultra-Orthodox parties left it over this issue, is trying to approve a bill to maintain part of its exemptions that will be debated in Parliament next week.
Beyond the pale
In the midst of this process, and against the background of the rejection of this community on the margins of society, with a high rate of (voluntary) unemployment and that benefits from subsidies and avoids what is an obligation for others, the ultra-Orthodox communities (also known as haredi) organized this Thursday a large demonstration with followers coming from all corners of Israel.
Haredis usually live in cities or neighborhoods made up solely of these religious people, with their own educational system segregated by gender and a life outside the internet or smartphones. Men usually devote themselves to studying religious texts and women work and take care of children.
Under Santiago Calatrava’s Rope Bridge, at the entrance to Jerusalem, the Haredis gathered in a protest between religious songs and recitations of the Torah.
There it was Shlomo Cohenarrived from Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Tel Aviv. On one side of the mass, made up entirely of men, this religious man in his 50s explained how, for him, the protest seeks to preserve Jewish identity.
“What we are saying is that an Army without an identity or a nation without an identity will not be able to fight. It has no future”he told EFE, recalling how the last major haredi protest occurred a decade ago for similar reasons. As Cohen spoke, the leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, stated: “If you can march in the streets, you can march in military training”.
For Cohen, while in other countries those who protect national identity are considered a treasure, in Israel it is the opposite: “They treat us like outcasts and criminals because the system has decided to ignore all laws”he complained, before warning the journalist to avoid disturbances in case a woman was not well received.
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One goal: study the Torah
Some of the Haredis still speak Yiddish, the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and others Hebrew, but very few English and some, such as David AyeshaiFrench due to its Gallic Sephardic origins.
“What the world must understand is that the Jewish people are only here to study the Torah, which is what maintains the world for us”explained this man in his sixties and resident of Jerusalem among the protesters.
According to this haredi, his community works for everyone so that “the whole world can resist and can pass the tests until the arrival of the messiah”the belief that guides the life of some variants of ultra-Orthodox Judaism.
“We defend our right to study in complete freedom and on our land,” he says, adding that the laws to force them to go to the Army “They are made by leftists who want to put an end to the expansion of the religious world”. “Its objective – sentence – is to prevent us from studying the Torah.”