For years there were complaints that religious Jewish men avoided serving in the IDF. Now that there are 3,000 Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men in the IDF, that much of the National Religious public is demanding similar religious standards to what the Haredim are demanding, and that an inordinate percentage of the officer corps is religious, secular Israelis - as represented by Haaretz - are reconsidering whether they really want all those religious people in the IDF. I will pass this on with a small excerpt and without further comment.Orr says he never encountered religious soldiers boycotting events featuring female singers. He certainly never imagined stories such as these, culled randomly from the media this week: about the IDF gradually adopting stricter (kasher lemehadrin ) dietary standards (from the army's weekly Bamahane ); about Rabbi Eli Sadan, head of the pre-military academy in Eli, lecturing about the "dedication and courage" of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir (Yedioth Ahronoth ); and about the IDF Education Corps' directive that soldiers not attend the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin (Haaretz ).Read the whole thing.
When it comes to relations between religious and secular soldiers, it seems that indeed, this is no longer the army we used to know. As if we blinked and the army changed.
The IDF's policy with respect to kosher food, drafted by the first IDF rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Goren in the 1950s, was based on the lowest common denominator that could be found between religious and secular soldiers: Each side sacrificed something, but the army's dining halls were open to all. Yet now this situation isn't good enough for the IDF's 3,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers, and a growing group of Haredi-Zionist soldiers won't accept it either. The army's rabbinate is currently leaning toward accepting these ultra-Orthodox soldiers' demands and toughening kashrut rules, which will require larger budgets.
Of course, the growing number of religious soldiers and officers forces the army to make adjustments; now it has to face an array of issues that did not have to be addressed in the past. Yet some of these changes, particularly those involving women, stem from power struggles between rabbis not affiliated with the army, who compete to make stricter demands of their students in uniform.
November 2011 data from the IDF Manpower Directorate, compiled yesterday, shows that the national-religious school system sends more graduates to combat units than any other educational system. National-religious graduates make up an even larger percentage of combat officers. At time when many secular youths, including those who choose combat units, are content to serve their mandatory three years before returning to civilian life, religious soldiers are being educated to stay in uniform beyond the minimum. Thus, 42 percent of cadets in the most recent infantry officer training course were religious (nine cadets in this course stood trial for boycotting the contentious ceremony with women singers ).
Rabbi Sadan's influence on these soldiers is considerable; some say he has the impact and stature of a major general. In 1988, Sadan established the religious pre-army academy Bnei David in the settlement of Eli - today the country's largest and most important such institution, many of whose graduates go on to command battalions.
If the comments become more uncivil than usual, I will close them.
