The Promoting Equality of the Burden Committee continues meeting towards formulating the new guidelines that will become law, dictating the new standard for ‘sharing the burden’, namely compelling chareidim and Arab citizens to serve in the IDF or an approved national service framework.
According to the daily Haaretz the IDF has already signaled a willingness to establish three new battalions under Netzach Yehuda, more commonly known as Nachal Chareidi. This would provide a suitable environment to draft chareidim into combat units.
In the past, the military opposed such a move, not wishing to create a sectored branch of the army. The army is not thrilled about assigning all the chareidim to one battalion and prefers to mainstream new recruits to dilute their presence, spreading them out over the other combat brigades.
Brigadier-General Gadi Admom, who heads the planning unit of IDF Personnel Branch, presented his master plan to the committee, confirming the IDF’s willingness and ability to establish new combat battalions to process 2,000 chareidi recruits in addition to the existing Nachal Chareidi. Agmon stated the IDF is still weighing options and one of the new battalions may be assigned to air defense as well as plans to expand the Homefront Command.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office is quoted as telling Haaretz “That part of addressing the response required for the chareidim, a number of options are being weighed. This includes the establishment of additional combat units that are homogeneous to the chareidi lifestyle. In addition, options that were ruled out in the past are also being discussed at this time”.
Some of these options include assigning chareidi soldiers to Israel Police and Israel Prison Authority. The IDF currently provides 2,700 soldiers to those institutions annually.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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5 Responses
Combat, air, police, plant flowers, anything, just don’t learn!
The biggest problem with Charedim serving in the IDF having the Jewish state accommodate those follow Judaism. Should the IDF make the necessary changes then that would be a major breakthrough.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an exchange program. Where for every Charedi boy who serves in the army & “shares the burden” one chiloni boy learns Torah & shares that burden.
So you get a large group of people who don’t especially like the government (though some are actually fanatically for the idea of supporting Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, all of Eretz Yisrael), act in a way to make them hate the government – and then give them automatic weapons. Do you really want to find out what would happen if a Jewish unit protects the Jews of a settlement from the police who are trying to evict them?
And you still run the military as a whole in way that precludes Hareidim from serving other than in “Jim Crow” type segregated units, unless of course they give up being frum. And of course, the commanders will all be outsiders to keep the hareidim in line. Don’t even consider the idea of making the whole of the IDF “Frum friendly” (perhaps with special arrangements for hiloni fanatics who can’t stand resting on Shabbos, eating kosher food or not engaging in “you know what, which we can’t discuss on YWN”, etc.).
Maybe this is a good time to “short” Israeli securities?
Palestinian bonds will start to look like a good investment.
so are the yeshiva bochrim actually going to be drafted? what do the gedolim say?
just imagine, the IDF could become the biggest outreach project ever known. that could realy upset a few people. wait till some of these sonei yisroel’s kinderlach come back from the army wearing streimelach!
#4 as Rav Elconon Wasserman pointed out Kedusha is not so contagious Tuma’ah is on the other hand much more contagious.
The Israeli Army is not a good place to get into. It is whole big system that ultimately is meant to change a ‘wimpy’ Ben torah to a Matcho (a nice good Eisov). Children of Ya’akov Avinu were not meant for this army. It is a true tragedy for those who were brainwashed until now to go there, and will be disastrous for those who succumb to it now.