Between the ultra-Orthodox and the military, “perhaps the mental barrier has fallen” – liberation

Exempted from military service and long neglected in security matters, the clerics are torn between seeing the Hamas attack as divine punishment and wanting to be part of the war effort.

200,000 worshipers fled the Lithuanian synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak, wearing hats, in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Inside the modest plastered concrete temple, dozens of men sweat over their Talmuds. “We are ahead”, Shlomo Cahen, French-speaking, with a bushy orange beard, is flanked by his son-in-law, Israel Presachem. A front 80 kilometers from Gaza? “Everything happens there. Prayer and study help our soldiers, guns aren’t everything. So they have been working hard since the start of the war, when the Hamas offensive began on October 7th.

For decades, the Haredi (“God-fearers”, in Hebrew) live in a sort of parallel dimension in Israel. They rarely recognize the state established in 1948 by the Zionists Hilonym (to speak of “secular”, non-practicing Jews), they pieced together a hybrid entity, balancing liberal aspirations and Jewish identity, far removed from the strict theocracy that religious people dreamed of hastening the appearance of the Messiah. In the early years of Israel, a very small amount, the Haredi Received