Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last Thursday sent Deputy AG Gil Limon, and the legal counsel of the finance ministry Assi Messing, a detailed letter explaining why, in his opinion, the decision to cancel daycare seriously harms working Haredi women and the integration of the Haredi sector in the job market, sentencing Haredim to poverty. Also, Smotrich stressed the entire issue is outside their purview.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara last week ruled that the state must stop funding daycare centers for the toddlers of Haredi families where the father has failed to enlist in the IDF (Collective Punishment: AG Terminates Daycare for Haredi Families with Draft Dodgers). The decision to make life miserable for Haredi families who depend on the state subsidies for childcare, especially when the wife is working full-time too, follows a High Court ruling from July 2023, which canceled the blanket exemption from enlistment for Haredi Israelis.
According to estimates, about 6,700 families will be affected by the decision to stop subsidizing daycare for children of Haredi men aged 18 to 26, just 3 weeks before the school year begins. This means some 10,000 children whose parents will be left without appropriate daycare, some of whom are listed by the Welfare Ministry as economically needy.
Smotrich is furious that the decision was made in a collaboration between the AG and the finance ministry’s legal counsel without consulting the decision-making echelon, the finance minister. “It’s amazing that you conduct discussions, exchange correspondence and make decisions with far-reaching implications on budgetary and economic issues among yourselves, without even thinking of someone who deserves to at least be included in the process, namely the finance minister,” Smotrich wrote. “Yours is a country within a country,” he noted.
Conducting discussions without his involvement, Smotrich explained, had led to a wrong decision: “The starting point that led to the decision was that the daycare tuition subsidy was given due to the father’s Torah study, to support for this study, based on the High Court’s ruling regarding the yeshiva budget after the expiration of the draft outline. This premise is fundamentally wrong, a house of cards with no connection to reality. The tuition subsidy has nothing to do with the father’s Torah study. Instead, it is intended to encourage the mother to go to work, while helping to finance daycare for her children.”
“The subsidy was given with the stated goal of promoting the integration of Haredi women in the job market. The government decided that the subsidy would also be given to mothers whose husbands are studying in yeshiva and are not at home. This was a pragmatic decision based on a simple fact of life, according to which in a Haredi family where the father studies Torah, and the mother stays at home to take care of the children even at the cost of poverty and a low standard of living,” Smotrich continued.
The finance minister explained that the daycare subsidy caused many Haredi women to go to work: “This has been a resounding success. In the last two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of Haredi women’s employment. You would have to be blind not to see the positive impact of Haredi women’s employment on the economy and Haredi society.” Smotrich warned that the decision of the legal counsels to stop the daycare centers’ subsidies constitutes dramatic damage to the economy.
Smotrich demanded that the two counsels “immediately revoke your fundamentally wrong ruling, allow me to continue with my economic policy that supports growth and the integration of Haredi women in the employment market, and refrain from sabotaging it and the economy illegally and unreasonably. By my authority as the Minister of Finance, I order the continuation of subsidizing daycare, as stated by the criteria given by the Ministry of Labor. If you believe that this decision is illegal, the door is open to you to petition the High Court, where I will demand independent representation.”
The finance minister concluded: “It is hard to escape the feeling that when it comes to the Haredi public and its budgets, you are repeatedly motivated by a hostile agenda that seeks every which way, above and below ground, to harm and thwart [the Haredim]. I wish you invested a fraction of the energy you invest in harming the budgets of the Haredi public in helping me in my efforts to prevent leakage of government budgets to organized crime, and my fight against illegal capital.”
