In the hours after two babies lost their lives in an unlicensed and massively overcrowded daycare in the ultra-Orthodox Romema neighborhood of Jerusalem on Monday, Haredi leaders blamed the tragedy on the state and the legislative efforts to draft young men of the community.
Later in the day, dozens protested against the planned autopsies of the two young victims, burning trash cans and blocking the street.
Ultra-Orthodox politicians addressed the tragedy in meetings at the Knesset.
“Who can say, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood?’ When a very large population is suddenly pushed into hardship, people are forced to look for other solutions, and the consequences can be harsh and bitter,” said Aryeh Deri, chairman of the Sephardic Haredi party Shas.
Addressing his party’s MKs during their weekly faction meeting in the Knesset on Sunday, Deri insisted that it was “forbidden to operate unlicensed daycares,” but that, “at the same time, a deep soul-searching is also required.”
Deri appeared to refer to cuts made to Haredi budgets following last year’s High Court of Justice ruling that decades-long exemptions from military service granted to Haredi men were illegal.
Since then, yeshivas harboring draft dodgers have seen their budgets slashed, and the Attorney General’s Office instructed the Labor Ministry to cut daycare subsidies for the children of evaders.
Fellow Shas MK Moshe Arbel, who until July served as interior minister, voiced a similar sentiment.
“In the State of Israel, the children of illegal immigrants are entitled to daycare centers and kindergartens,” he said in a statement. “In the name of the struggle against the ultra-Orthodox public, the children of the avreikhim [married full-time yeshiva students] are expelled from supervised daycare centers.”
“The blood of innocent babies, children who have not yet tasted sin, cries out from the ground,” he added. “It is incumbent upon all of us to stop the persecution; the lives of children must remain outside of any political struggle!”
The ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism party explicitly also blamed the tragedy on the cut to daycare subsidies.
In a statement, the party declared that the incident “occurred despite clear and repeated warnings previously issued explicitly against the severe measures [against draft dodgers], which resulted in families being unable to cope with the financial burden imposed on them, causing severe overcrowding in daycare centers that had not been closed.”
“It has become clear that these decrees for these measures have taken on heavy responsibility and guilt,” the party added.
Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits, due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.
For the past year and a half, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law that would keep its constituency out of the IDF, despite the High Court ruling.
A current version of the bill put forward by the government proposes continued military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while purportedly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions.
Critics have long contended that the Haredi community has a tendency to ignore safety regulations, which, over the years, have resulted in disasters such as the 2021 Meron crush, where 45 men and boys were killed at the hilltop gravesite of a second-century sage in northern Israel.
“The reasons why there are so many unlicensed and unsafe operations in the charedi (sic) sector is that they don’t care to do things in a way that follows professional and/or legal protocols based on safety experts,” Modern Orthodox rabbi Natan Slifkin wrote in his popular blog Rationalist Judaism. “We have seen this endlessly — with how they drive, with how they protest, with how they build buildings, with how they dealt with the pandemic, and most devastatingly with Meron.”
He also noted that the specific unlicensed daycare where 55 babies and toddlers were kept has existed for some 30 years, as has been widely reported in Hebrew media. Images circulating in Hebrew media showed children sleeping on bathroom floors and in closets.
Medical experts and authorities were trying to determine the cause of the incident. Possible explanations include dehydration and excessive temperatures caused by heaters in unventilated, crowded spaces.
The incident was initially suspected to have involved hazardous materials, but police said they ruled that out as a cause.
The State Attorney’s Office was seeking to conduct an autopsy of the babies’ bodies to determine the cause of death. The Ynet outlet reported that one of the two families of the babies has agreed to an autopsy, while the other has declined one.
The request was met with protests by hundreds of hardline Haredim in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Demonstrators blocked buses, burned garbage dumpsters and clashed with police. Officers, who warned that the unrest could put the protesters’ lives at risk, employed a water cannon to disperse them.
Halacha, or Jewish law, generally opposes autopsies on the grounds that the human body is sacred and thus should not be tampered with after death, and urges that funerals be held as quickly as possible after a person dies.
