Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is working on a law to reduce the age that haredi yeshiva students are eligible to leave their studies and enter the workforce without triggering a military draft order.
At present the age stands at 26 — and up to that point, yeshiva students must be actively learning Torah full time in order to avoid being drafted into the Israel Defense Forces.
But cabinet secretary Yossi Fuchs told Mishpacha Magazine in an interview on Wednesday that government ministers have approved a decision to lower the age for military exemption to 23, a modification to the current draft exemption law.
“Effectively, whoever finishes yeshiva and wants to go out and work will be able to,” Fuchs said. “They won’t enter the job market before their peers who served in the army, but they still will enter the real world and find their place in it.”
The employment rate for haredi men reached an all-time high of 55.8 percent in the second quarter of 2023, according to data published by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) on Wednesday, Ynet report.
Yeshiva students who are learning Torah full-time and are exempt from military service receive a special government stipend to help deal with living expenses. Many of those students are married by age 24 and face a struggle to maintain their studies and yet support their budding families.
Fuchs added that the cabinet is also planning to pass a law incentivizing military service “by ensuring rewards and breaks for those who do serve.”
The coalition will seek to pass the draft exemption law as a Basic Law, which would enshrine the legislation within the permanent set of laws that serve the country as a quasi constitution, thus making it “immune to judicial review,” Fuchs added.
