Of the 3,000 religious Haredi men who received army conscription notices during the summer, only 461 complied, Knesset lawmakers were told on Monday.
Testifying to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division added that arrest warrants were issued for 1,212. Another 1,242 individuals who did not report to recruitment centers are barred from leaving the country, Tayeb added.
The military began making plans to draft yeshiva students after Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled in June that exemptions for the Haredi community were illegal. The issue has not been resolved and is contributing to a coalition crisis.
Military service is compulsory for all Israeli citizens. However, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the country’s leading rabbis agreed to a status quo that deferred military service for Haredi men studying in yeshivot, or religious institutions. At the time, no more than several hundred men were studying in yeshivot.
However, the Haredi community has grown significantly since Israel’s founding. In January 2023, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that Haredim are Israel’s fastest-growing community and projected it would constitute 16% of the population by the end of the decade. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the number of yeshiva students exceeded 138,000 in 2021.
A recent survey found that the Israeli public is shifting decisively in favor of integrating Orthodox Jews into military service. The Israel Democracy Institute found that only 9% of Israelis support the current arrangement exempting Haredim from military service, a steep decline from 22% ten months earlier.
