between the ultra-Orthodox and the army, “perhaps a mental barrier has just fallen” – Libération

Exempted from military service and long indifferent to security affairs, the clerics are divided between seeing the Hamas attack as divine punishment and the desire to be part of the war effort.

A hubbub escapes from a Lithuanian synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak, 200,000 religious people in hats, crowded together in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Inside the modest plastered concrete temple, dozens of men, sweating over their talmuds. “We are at the front”, says Schlomo Cahen, French-speaking, bushy orange beard, flanked by his baby son-in-law, Israel Breisachem. The front here, 80 kilometers from Gaza? “Everything happens up there. Prayer and study help our soldiers, guns are not everything.” So, since the Hamas attack on October 7 and the start of the war, they have been working hard.

For decades, the haredim (the “God-fearers”, in Hebrew) live in a sort of parallel dimension in Israel. They barely recognize the state founded in 1948 by the Zionists hilonim (“secular”, to speak of non-religious Jews), who had cobbled together a hybrid object, balancing liberal aspirations and Jewish identity, far from the rigorous theocracy that religious people dream of to hasten the appearance of the messiah. Negligible quantity in the early years of Israel, the haredi obtained ai