Israel Is Funding Its Own Future Illiteracy

by Rabbi Moshe Pitchon

This essay is part of a broader series assessing the long-term issues that should shape Israel’s 2026 election debate.

Israel is financing an educational model that systematically denies hundreds of thousands of children the tools required to function in modern society—and doing so at a scale no other democracy would tolerate. 

The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) education system now accounts for roughly a quarter of Hebrew-language Jewish schooling and nearly one-fifth of the entire Israeli education system. Due to high birth rates, its share is growing rapidly. Within a generation, today’s students will make up a much larger portion of Israel’s working-age population—or, more plausibly, of those unable to work.

Most Haredi schools do not teach the state’s core curriculum, including mathematics, science, English, and civics. In many boys’ schools, instruction in these subjects ends entirely by the early teenage years, replaced by exclusive religious study. Yet these institutions continue to receive substantial public funding from the State of Israel.

The consequences are no longer theoretical. Only a small minority of Haredi boys take matriculation (bagrut) exams, and fewer still pass them. Labor-force participation among ultra-Orthodox men remains the lowest of any identifiable group in Israel.

Israel’s leading economists have warned for years that this trajectory is unsustainable. An economy built on advanced technology, defense industries, and global integration cannot indefinitely support a rapidly growing population educated for dependency rather than productivity. The arithmetic is unforgiving. Fewer workers will be asked to support more non-workers, even as defense, healthcare, and welfare costs continue to rise. 

This is not merely an economic problem. It is a civic one.

Schools that avoid core studies also avoid civics education, limiting students’ exposure to democratic norms, state institutions, and shared obligations. Over time, this deepens social fragmentation and erodes the sense of collective responsibility on which Israel’s security and resilience depend. 

What makes Israel’s approach particularly unusual is not the existence of religious schools—many democracies accommodate faith-based education—but the scale and permissiveness of state funding without meaningful enforcement. Israeli law formally requires publicly funded schools to teach core subjects. In practice, supervision is minimal, inspections are sparse, and exemptions have become routine. The largest ultra-Orthodox school networks continue to receive government funds even when compliance cannot be credibly demonstrated.

No other OECD country operates such an arrangement. Elsewhere, private or religious schools may emphasize faith-based instruction, but governments insist on minimum educational standards, especially when taxpayer money is involved. Israel is an outlier—and not in a way that serves its long-term interests.

Politics explains much of this. Ultra-Orthodox parties have become indispensable coalition partners, granting them leverage to secure funding while resisting curricular reform. Efforts to establish a public ultra-Orthodox education stream that combines rigorous religious study with core subjects have shown real demand and modest growth. Yet this stream remains marginal, constrained by political obstacles and local vetoes imposed precisely where adoption should have been easiest.

Supporters of the status quo often frame reform as a cultural or religious assault. That framing is misleading.

Judaism does not prohibit mathematics, languages, or science. Classical Jewish sources affirm work, responsibility, and engagement with the world. For most of Jewish history, full-time Torah study was the preserve of a small scholarly elite, not the organizing principle of an entire male population. The contemporary “society of learners” is not an ancient inheritance but a modern political construction, enabled by state subsidies and sustained by coalition arrangements.

Nor does the current system ultimately serve the ultra-Orthodox community itself. An education model that blocks the acquisition of basic skills traps its students in long-term dependency, limits social mobility, and deepens poverty. It leaves young men ill-prepared for a labor market that will only grow more demanding.

Israel faces a choice. It can continue to postpone reform in the name of coalition stability, financing an expanding system of educational non-participation. Or it can insist—gradually but firmly—that any school receiving public funds meet verifiable minimum standards in core subjects.

This need not mean cultural homogenization or the erosion of religious life. It requires acknowledging a basic civic principle: public money should prepare citizens to participate in the economy and civic life of the state that funds them.

This is not about changing the Haredim. It is about changing the state’s willingness to fund educational abdication. No other enemy is required when a country educates its children for dependency.