A record number of kollel students will begin their studies this year: 63,000. This is nearly a two-thirds increase in a decade, Education Ministry data shows: There were 38,000 students at yeshivas for married men in 1998. In total, the Education Ministry will be funding 95,000 yeshiva students over age 18 this school year. This is more than twice the number of draftees in an Israel Defense Forces induction cycle.
The increased number of yeshiva students stems directly from the thwarting of the Tal Law, which was supposed to integrate ultra-Orthodox men into the military and economy. Those responsible for the Tal Law's failure are the IDF, which did not create suitable service frameworks for the ultra-Orthodox; the Finance Ministry, which did not budget for civilian service; and the ultra-Orthodox themselves, who supported the law in the Knesset but did not try to implement it. As a result, in the six years the Tal Law has been in place, only 3,400 yeshiva students took the permitted year off to decide on their future, and the number of non-working yeshiva students continues to grow rapidly.
These men's absence from the labor force is damaging the GNP by an estimated NIS 5 billion to NIS 10 billion annually. The Finance Ministry and the Knesset Research and Information Center initially calculated a NIS 5 billion loss, but since then, the number of students has grown by one-third, and the damage has presumably grown accordingly. Economist Eli Berman of the University of California, San Diego, a leading researcher on the economics of religion, believes that even NIS 10 billion is an underestimate: It does not take into account the stipends and budgets the ultra-Orthodox receive so that yeshiva students have a guaranteed income.
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One definitely could accept the argument that the State of Israel, as a Jewish state, should fund the living expenses of thousands of religious scholars, even if most of the country's citizens reject the lifestyle whereby Torah is one's craft. However, it is impossible to understand why Israel is continuing to fund an unlimited number of yeshiva students, as if Israel had a compulsory education law with no age limit. The state itself is thus helping to push tens of thousands of men away from the labor force, seriously harming the economy and forcing the taxpaying public to dig into its own pockets to fund the lifestyle of a growing community that has chosen to study instead of work.
This matter requires a reform no less bold than Likud's child-allowance cut. The State of Israel must declare that it will support all yeshiva students only until age 23. Past that age, it must fund only a limited quota of students, who could receive even double or triple today's monthly NIS 720 stipend. Anyone who wants to continue to learn but does not make the quota will need to pay for it himself, or be supported by donors. The kollels will thus return to nurturing rabbis and religious scholars, and not serve as a refuge from military service and work.
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