High Court suggests compromise extending haredi daycare for three months

The High Court of Justice suggested a compromise on the issue of daycare subsidies for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yeshiva students on Monday, according to which Labor Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur (Shas) must publish the criteria for daycare subsidies within a month, while haredi yeshiva students who are required to enlist in the IDF will receive the subsidies for three additional months.

The High Court gave Ben-Tzur until Thursday to respond.

End of haredi exemption 

Following a High Court ruling at the end of June that officially ended the haredi exemption from IDF service, the Attorney-General’s Office instructed that yeshiva students who were no longer exempt from service could no longer receive government subsidies due to their yeshiva studies.

One of these subsidies was for daycare for children under the age of three for families in which the mother works, and the father is a yeshiva student.

Initially, the attorney-general consented to a request by Ben-Tzur to enable the subsidies to continue for three months after the start of the school year to allow the Labor Ministry to organize itself for the policy change. The subsidy is expected to expire at the end of November.

However, Ben-Tzur refused to accept the three-month limit and refrained from issuing any criteria. This blocked all eligible Israelis, including single parents and others, from receiving the subsidy.

The new suggestion came at the end of a hearing in the High Court filed by a number of organizations against the government and the attorney-general.

These included, on the one hand, a petition demanding that haredi yeshiva students continue receiving daycare subsidies as before even if they ignore the legal demand to enlist, and on the other, petitions demanding the daycare subsidies for the yeshiva students cease immediately.

The issue of the haredi daycare subsidy is at the heart of the public controversy over the haredi IDF draft and the fact that despite the June ruling, the number of haredi draftees remains very low. The ending of the daycare subsidies is a significant financial sanction, and Ben-Tzur has attempted to circumvent it to de facto enable the haredi exemption to continue.