OPINION: Haredi Judaism’s rise was the comeback no one saw coming

Shortly after his arrival in this country, my father began to keep a diary.  It was written mainly in English, somewhat surprisingly, as it was not his first language, but phrases from other languages did appear. In particular, a famous French proverb, ‘Rien n’arrive ni comme on le craint ni comme on l’espere’. Nothing happens either as you fear or as you hope. Predicting the future is a mug’s game.

During my own lifetime I have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, Brexit, the rise of China, the end of apartheid and the election of Trump (twice). Who would have predicted any of these events?

The phenomenon closest to me personally, however, has been the survival, in fact the resurgence, of Orthodox Judaism. When I grew up as a teenager in the early years after the Holocaust, no one gave it much of a chance. The one third of the world’s Jews who were wiped out in the Holocaust contained the vast majority of its Orthodox Jews and almost all its yeshivot (religious academies).

It was predicted that secularisation and assimilation would finish off the process. In 1948 a member of the Knesset of Yemenite descent predicted that in a generation no Yemenite Jew would even know how to lay tefillin (phylacteries) let alone be inclined to do so. In 1948 Ben Gurion, predicting that the yeshivot were on their last legs, was prepared to agree that their students should be exempt from army service. At the time, the number of people covered by this exemption was about 450.

Such predictions have turned out to be wide of the mark. The number of students in Yeshivot claiming exemption from army service in 2023 was 65,000. In Israel alone, ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim as they prefer to be called, now number more than 1.3 million, or 14 percent of the total Jewish population. Significantly, they number 26 percent of the high school population. 60 percent of them are aged twenty or younger.

Their share of the overall population is only expected to grow. With numbers comes power. The current Israeli government is completely in hock to them. Whilst the exemption from army service is deeply unpopular with the Israeli public, the chances of its being abolished in the near future are very remote.

The obvious explanation for this growth is demography. A Haredi woman will have, on average, six to seven children in her lifetime. Her secular sister will have two to three. The total Haredi population is growing at the rate of between 3 percent and 4 percent per annum, which means it will double every eighteen to twenty-four years. In the eighty years since the Holocaust, compound growth, the eighth wonder of the world, has therefore had time to work its magic on Jewish demography.

But high birth rates are not the whole story. Equally significant are the high retention rates with regard to the younger generation and, to a lesser degree, the number of secular Jews becoming religious in the baal teshuvah movement. Whereas one hundred years ago children born in Haredi homes were turning to socialism, secular Zionism or just assimilating, now the vast majority are adhering to the ways of their parents or even becoming stricter. In part this is the result of greater prosperity. There is no longer the same pressure to find economically viable employment – Jews do not need to break Shabbat to do so. In part it is due to the greater respect in which Jews are held in the community generally and to the decrease in institutional antisemitism.

The minor public school hat I went to add a quota on the admission of Jewish boys and was quite unapologetic about it. The High Master of St Paul’s, defending his quota in an interview with a national newspaper, said that if they admitted all eligible Jewish boys, they would be ’overrun’. No headmaster would dare make such a statement today. Even Eton has a sizeable Jewish contingent. The provost proudly showed me the treasures of its library of Judaica and explained that they had a Jewish chaplain to look after the needs of their Jewish pupils.

Medical schools and law firms, once closed to Jews, now have them in the highest positions. Jews no longer feel the need to anglicise their names or to abandon traditional clothing. Children of mixed marriages frequently identify as Jewish. Before World War II, they almost never did.  The increased self-respect that Jews can feel now has a ripple effect on the Haredim. With communal role models all around them, they are no longer incentivised to drop their Jewishness. As my father’s French proverb implies, history moves in complicated ways.

• Vivian Wineman is the former President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a trustee of the Wineman Charitable Foundation.