Members of Israel’s Haredi community are warning of a religious war after this country’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government must start drafting yeshiva students into its military.
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(OPINION) The most strictly religious Jews — the mystical-oriented Hasidic followers of historic rabbinic lineages and the “mitnagdim,” Hasidism’s more intellectually focused religious critics — suffered some of the worst losses in the Holocaust. But a new survey says that by 2040, if their current growth rate persists, about a quarter of the world’s Jews will likely be Haredi.
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(ANALYSIS) After the mismanagement of a Jewish festival in Meron, Israel in which 45 pious Jews were crushed to death in a stampede and tens of thousands more exposed to COVID-19, there was only one reasonable course for the government to follow in advance of last week’s planned Baba Sali celebration – cancel it. And then flip-flop.
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The pandemic has exposed a deep rift between Israel’s 1 million ultra-Orthodox Jews and the country’s other 8.25 million Jewish and Arab citizens. Health minister Yaakov Litzman, who is Hassidic, has been accused of breaking his own ministry’s social distancing guidelines and then meeting with the prime minister and other senior government officials, prompting calls for his resignation from secular society.
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