Nearly two million Israelis, including hundreds of thousands of children and seniors, were living below the poverty line in 2023, according to an annual report released by the National Insurance Institute (NII). The report underscores a troubling picture of economic inequality in Israel, placing the country near the bottom of the OECD rankings for poverty based on disposable income.
The report reveals that 1.98 million people, or 20.7% of the population, lived in poverty last year. Among them were 872,400 children (27.9% of the child population) and 158,500 senior citizens (12.8% of the senior population). Rates of deprivation were particularly severe in Arab and Charedi communities, with Modiin Ilit—a predominantly Charedi city—identified as the poorest locality. Other cities with high poverty levels included Yerushalayim, Beit Shemesh, Bnei Brak, and Lod.
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6 Responses
If Chareidi men do not work, it is not surprising that there is a high level of poverty amongst Chareidim. There’s a reason that Chazal said that a father has to teach his son an Umnus Kala uNeki’a – it’s precisely to avoid poverty and the need to live off of charity.
There was a hora’as sha’a after the Holocaust based on the need to rebuild the base of Torah knowledge that had been destroyed. Whether that still applies at the scale that it did then is very much open to question.
an Israeli Yid
That is expected given the community’s view on working/learning….
oy the Zionists spend billions on some gadgets that dont work in the name of security, but refuse to have Torah learners live in dignity and force them to collect in America.
If 25% of the country is “below the poverty line” then you have set that line too high and should lower it. It is a relative line, not an absolute. One suspects an underestimation of income due to many “off the books” jobs and failing to treat academic employment as “employment”.
Given the many of the “poor” are frum Jews working for frum industries, businesses and academic institutions, rather than choosing to switch to more lucrative jobs outside the de facto “frum ghetto” (defined socially as well as economically), it suggests they are fairly content, which suggests those producing the data in the article are seriously unfamiliar with social and economic conditions in Eretz Yisrael.
This is very misleading.
Anybody who would see what constitutes “below the poverty line” in Israel will see why chareidim do not see any reason to be above it. They don’t need smartphones for every member, nor TVs in every room, nor vacations to Europe for everybody. If you would add up all the extra “necessities” apply it to each member of the large families and decide that they can’t afford it, then you’ve placed a perfectly happy family below the poverty line.
This is not to imply that there aren’t families in bad financial situations, there definitely are, but to say that the majority of Modiin Ilit (a city whose municipal government is rated one of the most financially fluid and efficient in the entire country) is wallowing in abject poverty is outright misleading.
Tell the chareidi world to go work and make life more pleasant for the wife and children