How Much Money Does the Israeli Government Give to Kollel Families?

RBS Jew:

Chareidim don’t make anyone pay more. You would be paying the same amount of Arnona regardless of whether I get a 90% discount or none at all.

EY MOM, of course it makes me pay more! The government has to pay for all of their expenses. Trash collection, lighting in the streets, paving roads, building parks, paying for police, running the municipal offices, the list continues. For every family that pays only 10% of their arnona property taxes, the rest of us has to pay the rest of their 90% plus our 100%!!! It’s simple mathematics & economics – exactly the subjects that the schools should be teaching in order to make us successful in earning a decent and honest living!

The problem is that people all justify to themselves why it’s OK for them to avoid paying taxes and living off of other people’s money. This is not an attack on chareidim – it’s an attack on everyone who works the system but then leaves the rest of us paying the bill. Even if you can work the system in a way that doesn’t get you arrested, it’s still wrong. Religious people are held to a higher standard than to say, “well everyone else is doing it and it’s not really illegal and the chilonim can do it too.” That’s a cop-out and not what halacha demands of us.

shein – this is the basic hashkafic argument. Halacha says quite a bit about this issue but you have to be intellectually honest to understand that. The chareidi movement has been given a tremendous amount but have not kept their part of the deal. There’s just so long that you can continue to take money before the system collapses under its own weight!

A case in point – the city where we live has been growing in the number of chareidi families tremendously over the years. Way too many of those families get a 90% discount on their arnona (property taxes). It’s now come to the point that there’s simply not enough money coming in from taxes to cover expenses. So, the municipality keeps refusing to pay for necessities. Instead of telling the chareidim that we simply can’t afford this anymore -They have recently raised our taxes in a most unscrupulous way – they reassessed everyone’s taxes by charging for communal spaces. A quote from the chareidi newspaper: “almost 70% of homeowners” had their assessments raised by including “areas such as elevator piers, stairwells, pergolas and even the area where the trash bins are situated as taxable property.” This was done because the city was asking the discount to be lowered from 90% to 70%. That means they were asking the chareidim to pay the smallest amount more in order to cover the expenses THAT THEY BENEFIT FROM EVERY DAY! They’re taxing us on the place where the dumpsters are in order to avoid charging the chareidim their fare share!!!!! The absolute worst of it – the chareidi paper is proud of it and said that this reassessment more than makes up for the difference.

This is the reason that so many people in Israel (both religious and not-yet-religious) are so fed up with the chareidi mentality. The chareidi movement (I’m careful to recognize that not every chareidi person is this way but the leadership is) has chosen to be unreasonable. They think of themselves and their money instead of thinking of what’s good for the Jewish people. Yes, this is the reason that people say it’s time to get an education and work. And I don’t mean just work a underpaying job or off-the-books job that keeps you under the poverty level and therefore exempt from income taxes.

Shein, you keep mentioning welfare, especially in the US, but the US has enacted welfare reform years ago. A person cannot be on welfare his whole life. It’s now illegal, and if you just want to sit all day and watch TV you’ll see that eventually you will stop getting your welfare checks.

It’s one thing to be in favor of Charedim sitting and learning all day, but it’s quite another to not even see that the other side has extremely valid points. I bet if you acknowledge those points and try to work it out, it will be a lot easier. People who don’t even get acknowledged are far less likely to work with you to resolve an issue. It’s time for the Charedi leaders to act like leaders and realize there is a communal problem of money.

shein: that’s very untrue, the chareidi points are considered all the time. Maybe not to the extent that you’d like them to be but none-the-less the people here constantly consider the chareidi people’s points. In fact, they consider religious people’s feelings all of the time even though it doesn’t necessarily result in the outcomes we always desire. That’s a democracy.

Also, can’t believe you want to compare yourself to those other cases. I completely disagree, if you pay taxes and someone else chooses to live off of those tax $$, then I have every right to tell them to get a job or a better paying job. The point of welfare and tzedaka is to help the person temporarily until they get on their feet. It’s NOT to continue paying for them just because they (or you) think it’s their “every right to remain as is” (your quote!) The US system REQUIRES the welfare recipient to always be searching for a job and do specific things in order to receive welfare benefits (I have a family member who works as a social worker and deals with this all the time). The problem is that there are some (many?) who falsely claim that they’re truly looking for a job or doing what they’re supposed to – that is totally against halacha even when they don’t get caught or prosecuted!

So there is no minhag at all to learn and survive on government benefits. Prior to then you had to work or starve

Your second sentence does a good job of explaining your first sentence.

I am a bit chareidi, and I am planning on doing national service next year. I actually requested to work in a chareidi environment, so hopefully, I will have an interview at a Chareidi Gan for girls with mild developmental delays. If you are saying that Chareidim don’t serve, keep in mind that this goes to show you that Chareidim don’t promote doing national service, yet they are open to accepting girls who are doing national service for them (which, I think is an oxymoron, plus most of the girls that apply to that gan might not even be chareidi). I was actually shocked, like mamash shocked, when I heard that chareidi special ed fans accept bnot sherut.

It’s actually funny – I just gave a ride home to a very sweet chareidi man on my home from a wedding. He was tremping on the side of the road and was going to the same city as I was. Anyway, he’s a very nice guy and has 12 children. He works as a security guard in various areas and was lamenting about how hard it is to support his family with this kind of salary. You could tell that he works very hard (it was about 11pm when I picked him up and he’d been working all day). We talked about him getting another job but he acknowledged that he can’t find anything that would pay enough with his lack of a good secular education. I kid you not – it’s funny that I just met him tonight especially since I never give tremps to people anymore (too dangerous) but his security uniform somehow reassured me. Anyway, bottom line, this is a common story here – there are many chareidi people who work very hard and still can’t bring home a respectable salary. It’s not fair to them because the chareidi leadership and society creates this dilema for them. Yes, you could tell that he’s a happy person but he’s suffering and was upset that he can’t even afford to take off time from work to go to school in order to get a better job. This was an older man too (I’d say in his 50s or 60s).

I’ll repeat what I said a few days ago – I am not trying to put down anyone but I also think there are many good people who are being put into a horrible and unsustainable situation. Provide your kids and yourself with a basic secular education so that you can work at a decent job and be able to hold your head high, provide for your family and not have to resort to government handouts or tzedaka.

oh brother, what he, and others in his situation, should do is take their family and waltz into their rabbis house and tell them their moving in. If enough people get through to their leaders, maybe their leaders will listen to them and not only to their handlers.

By gov. figures, there are 141,000 yeshiva and kollel students in Israel. 16,000 are non-israeli

Gov. gives about $2,000 a year to each one of the israelis and half that to non israelis

from the article:
“Kollel students receive an average of 2,000 shekels ($500) per month for committing to a full day of kollel study (from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and again from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.). In its heyday, state support covered about half of this sum, with the rest being raised by the kollels’ directors, mainly from overseas donors.”

This means that it’s a wash for the government. Their spend of $250 million is matched by overseas donations that pay for more than half of the kollel stipend and go into the economy. But a lot more goes into the economy because nobody lives on $2,000 a year in Israel. If each overseas student spends another $4,000 that’s another 64 million in the economy. Add to that visits by parents, funds for buildings – all of which go into the economy.

And let us not forget that America gives Israel 3.9 billion a year.

You want to know who pays for world torah study – america, not the state of israel. Israel profits from it.

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