| Baby sleeping under a toilet in the Chardeie childcare |
An utterly appalling tragedy happened in Jerusalem today. Two babies died and fifty-three other babies were sent to hospital as a result of an accident at a daycare center. The precise cause of the accident is not clear, but it involved toxic fumes from faulty or unsafe electrical equipment.
Within an hour of the horrific news spreading, charedi politicians had already taken advantage of this tragedy. They seized upon it to blame the Zionists. Their arguments run as follows:
This daycare center was not a proper licensed facility; it was an unlicensed and unsafe venture that crowded a huge number of babies into apartments. There were even babies put down on mattresses under a toilet. And whose fault is it that charedim are sending their babies to unlicensed, unsafe daycare? The Zionists, of course!
Why the Zionists? Because the High Court recently cut daycare subsidies for draft-dodging charedim, which leaves them unable to afford safe, licensed daycare for their babies while the husbands are in kollel and the wives are out at work. The Zionists, insisted the charedi MKs, have the blood of charedi children on their hands.
(One cannot but wonder what their response would have been if the tragedy had involved babies from non-charedi families. I suspect it would have been like with October 7th, which was diagnosed by R. Aharon Feldman and R. Moshe Meiselman as a message from God about the sinful ways of the Zionists, and/or as evidence of the dangers that face those who are not protected by Torah.)
Naturally, it wasn’t just the charedi MKs that seized upon the tragedy to advance a (false) political message. It was also the charedi enablers - the Likud politicians and the Bibi-supporters of Channel 14, who placed the blame on the High Court’s cancellation of daycare subsidies cut rather than on the charedim.
It is therefore necessary to address all the lies, slander, moral flaws, and dangers in the arguments being presented today by the charedi political leaderships: