Zionists Will Double Stipends for married yeshiva students

 Fresh details of the upcoming state budget show coalition agreements will pour billions of shekels into the ultra-Orthodox community and education programs with Orthodox messaging.

The fresh revelations came a day after networks reported that some NIS 5 billion ($1.37 billion) of the budget, still under negotiation, will be funneled to meet ultra-Orthodox demands.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is made up of his own Likud party and far-right religious and ultra-Orthodox partners that he needs to maintain a majority in the Knesset.

Included in the plans is boosting the monthly stipends for married yeshiva students, who form a major part of the ultra-Orthodox community and rely on the handouts to maintain their families as they spend their days in study rather than working.

According to the Kan public broadcast, Haredi parties are seeking a stipend increase of nearly 50 percent, from NIS 680 ($185) a month to NIS 1,000 ($272).

After it is approved, the increase in stipends will be paid out retroactively to cover all of 2023, Monday reports said. By contrast, some financial benefits for working parents that are to be set in the budget will only come into effect in January 2024, Channel 12 reported.

According to the network, funding for married yeshiva students is the key aspect of the budget that is yet to be agreed upon.

Also, in the coming year, NIS 40 million ($11 million) will go toward strengthening Haredi institutes that are exempt from teaching the core education program that is compulsory for schools in the education system — a sum that will increase to NIS 120 million ($32.7 million) next year.

The budget includes NIS 6 million ($1.6 million) for advice on “family purity,” referring to the strict rules of intimacy that Orthodox Jews abide by.

Among the other projects included in coalition agreements is NIS 200 million ($55 million) to go to a five-year plan to invest in and support “national and local heritage projects and the transmission of Jewish heritage.”

The Education Ministry will get NIS 16 million ($4.4 million) for a program whose purpose is to “increase and strengthen solidarity with the State of Israel, Jewish and Israeli identity and awareness of the results of assimilation among Diaspora Jewry,” Channel 12 reported.

A further NIS 30 million ($8 million) will be budgeted to the Education Ministry as a grant for education and Jewish culture “adapted to the religious way of life and memorial activity for the rabbis of religious Zionism.”

Another NIS 60 million ($16 million) will go toward building student dormitories in the West Bank, while NIS 2.25 million ($610,000) will go to the Hebron Regional Council, the local authority for a Jewish enclave in the West Bank Palestinian city.

Some NIS 500 million (almost $140 million) will reportedly go to the Jerusalem, Tradition and Mount Meron Ministry, headed by United Torah Judaism’s Meir Porush, and a similar sum to a government body for the socioeconomic advancement of the ultra-Orthodox.

As negotiations on the budget continue, Haredi parties are demanding hundreds of millions more, but senior Treasury officials have warned them that that will require deep cuts to other ministries, Channel 12 reported.

The exorbitant funds funneled to the Haredi community under the current government, amid soaring prices, has riled many in the secular public, with the issue — juxtaposed with high unemployment rates and low enlistment rates in the Haredi public — becoming a cause celebre for anti-government protests.