Growing Haredi Numbers Poised To Alter Global Judaism

Haredi Jews walking a neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. Creative Commons photo

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(OPINION) The Holocaust devastated European Jewry. The most strictly religious among them — the mystical-oriented Hasidic followers of historic rabbinic lineages and the “mitnagdim,” Hasidism’s more intellectually focused religious critics — suffered some of the worst losses.

Their insularity and suspicion of the larger world served them poorly at a time when maneuverability and adaptability might have helped them flee Nazi Europe for safety. Instead, they turned their noses up at non-Orthodox Jews and avoided dealing with non-Jews as much as possible.

This was true for both Hasidic and mitnagdim Jews, who are often lumped together by outsiders under the rubric “ultra-Orthodox.”

It’s a label many of them reject; they argue there’s nothing “ultra” about them and that they are only adhering closely to what they think of as “normative” rabbinic Judaism.

In Hebrew, they’re called “Haredi” or “Haredim,” the plural. That’s how I’ll refer to them in this post.

Samuel Heilman, an American academic expert on Haredi life, wrote the following on the subject for a PBS show on Hasidic Jews:

The three things the rebbes told their Hasidim to do led to their being blown away. The rebbes said: "Don't go to America, the treyfe medina (the unclean country), and don't go to the Zionist state, Palestine. Don't change your clothes or learn the surrounding language." So they couldn't disguise themselves or pass as gentiles. And, the rebbes said, "Stay close to me." They did stay close to the rebbes, but many of the rebbes (the Belzer, the Satmar, the Gerer)ran off and left all their people to die.

David Ben-Gurion, the secular Jewish Zionist leader who was Israel’s first prime minister, was convinced that circumstances following World War II would further depress Haredi numbers. Back then, the Haredim comprised just 5% of Mandatory Palestine’s pre-state Jewish population.

However, to gain United Nations backing for an independent Jewish state, Ben-Gurion believed he had to show full Jewish unity. That included Haredi support.

To that end, Ben-Gurion agreed to a list of compromises favorable to Haredi communities — compromises that bedevil Israel’s parliamentary political system to this day.

But oh, what a difference 74 years have made. The opposite of what Ben-Gurion figured would happen has come to pass.

A new survey produced by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research says that by 2040, if their current growth rate persists, about a quarter of the world’s Jews will likely be Haredi. Here’s the top of the survey story from Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, a liberal daily that publishes in English and Hebrew:

One out of every seven Jews in the world today is ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, according to a first-of-its kind study published Tuesday [May 3] by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research.

If current trends continue, the study predicted that nearly one out of every four Jews in the world will be Haredi by 2040.

The study estimated the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the world today at 2.1 million – 14 percent of the total world Jewish population. This represents the first ever attempt to calculate the global size of this specific community.

The survey found that more than 90 percent of Haredi Jews live in either Israel or the United States – the world’s two largest Jewish population centers. It also found that as much as 80 percent of the growth in the world Jewish population in recent years can be attributed to this community.

This spectacular growth was attributed to Haredi Jews having large families, high retention rates and longer lifespans and the decline of non-Orthodox congregational Judaism in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

All of this should come as no surprise to those who have paid serious attention to contemporary Jewish life. Israeli, Jewish diaspora, and international secular media have long covered the growth of Haredi Judaism and its impact on Israeli and American national and communal politics.

One example is this 2019 piece from Foreign Policy: “The Ultra-Orthodox Will Determine Israel’s Political Future.” And back in 2015, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research reported that about half of all British Jews will be Haredi by this century’s end.

It’s fair to say that the declines seen in liberal Reform and Conservative Judaism — which is still left of center despite its name — congregational enrollment numbers are analogous to the membership declines also faced by liberal Christian denominations. The rising numbers of those who self-identify as “nones,” meaning having no formal religious affiliation, or “spiritual but not religious” no doubt is also a fact impacting the congregational rolls.

So what’s the bottom line here?

It’s just one survey, and as any experienced journalist should know, survey results can be easily manipulated or simply incorrect. While it’s true we have ample experiential evidence that the trends highlighted by the survey are well under way, the circumstances driving this change can, and often do, change. The future’s not always ours to see.

Still, this finding was worthy of at least a smattering of international elite media coverage, in my opinion. After all, we’re talking about the possible bottoming out of liberal Jewish religious and cultural life — which have had profound influences in the U.S., across the global Jewish diaspora and, of course, in Israel. (More on this below.)

Readers may recall that I recently said the same about the similar lack of coverage over the announced closing of on-site classes at Cincinnati’s historic Reform Jewish seminary.

I have to believe that the Ukraine conflict is at least in part responsible for this lack of coverage. I can imagine some editor — someone struggling to cope with a shrinking editorial budget and too few staffers — thinking, “Ukraine’s president is a Jew. That’s all the time and space we have for Jewish coverage at the moment.”

Additionally, there’s America’s ever-more-nasty culture war, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the run-up to the midterm elections, inflation fears, our lingering COVID-19 pandemic, the usual run of mass shootings and other crime stories, Elon Musk and Twitter, the looming Donald Trump, climate change and everything else under the sun demanding our attention.

So I get the lack of coverage. Still, the decline of progressive Jewish life — not to mention what I’ll call mainstream Orthodox life, aka Modern Orthodoxy — and the extraordinary growth of the most theologically, socially and politically conservative of Jewish communities is a major story with potentially huge consequences.

Haredi numbers may be small in the overall scheme of things, but they tend to vote in blocs — and because they live close together to support communal religious institutions, they can have strong impacts on local elections.

Haredi Jews, as a whole, are the most economically limited of Jews. That’s because their community ideal is for adult men, those married included, to engage in full-time Torah learning in religious schools called “yeshivas” following limited immersion in secular studies — English communication skills, mathematics and science, general job skills. The norm is that their wives earn what they can outside the home when not also caring for a houseful of children.

That could mean diminished donations to community-wide federations and other Jewish institutions established to help all Jews, even as Haredi household financial needs multiply and draw from other community needs.

Moreover, Haredi and other Orthodox Jews were the only American Jews to support Trump. They generally support public funding of private religious schools — which their kids attend — and back strong abortion limitations.

In Israel, their right-wing political views will likely further stymie progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Their political demands for ever-larger slices of Israel’s national budget to support community financial needs, their disinclination to serve in the Israeli military and their retention of control over life-cycle rites — such as marriages and funerals — will mean more and more parliamentary bargaining. That’s not to mention further fraught relations between Haredi Israelis and the majority of Israeli Jews, who incline toward far more secular lifestyles.

Haredi Jews, because their dress identifies them as being stereotypical religious Jews, are often the targets of antisemitic attacks in the U.S. and Europe and terror attacks in Israel by Palestinians.

In short, there is much here to delve into. Why wait for your journalistic competitors to get these stories first?

This piece is republished with permission from GetReligion.org. Ira Rifkin is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, with special emphasis on globalization. He was formerly the news director of Belief Net, a Washington-based national correspondent for Religion News Service and has contributed to many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun and others.