Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel Face New Challenges

Less than 30 minutes' drive from the hip tech hub of Tel Aviv, Bnei Brak feels like another country and another time.

But a ruling in the country's highest court has changed everything and it's posing an existential threat to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political survival.The exemption for the ultra-Orthodox community is as old as Israel itself — when in the wake of the destruction of Jewish communities during The Holocaust, protecting religious scholars was considered important to the new Jewish state.

"And on the 7th of October, we all saw what that spiritual protection is worth. When the IDF didn't arrive, the Army of God, as they call it, also didn't arrive." Haim Laurence is a grey-bearded student at the Chazon Ish Kollel, a Jewish seminary for married men, and he's worried about the court's ruling.

"There's part of the nation to do fighting and part of the nation that do the praying for the success of the soldiers or the success of the whole nation," he said. "I am not enlisting because I hold a certain belief and if someone else does not believe in it, I have no way of explaining why I don't enlist," he said.

In 2017 Israel's supreme court ruled that blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students were discriminatory and illegal and it gave the state until March 31, 2024, to find a way to comply with the ruling. Israel says deadly Gaza aid convoy strike was a 'grave mistake', but experts say the images tell a different story'I'm so sorry': Teresa had a minor procedure to treat her chronic pain. The surgeon struck her spinal cord

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