A Curious Exception in Israel's Lockdowns
Orthodox Jews were excused of notable harshness in Israel's Covid lockdowns. This calls to question whether policies could have been inflicted by a political agenda instead of science from the start.
Israel was one of the countries that imposed harsh restrictions on public over notable periods of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite that, for some time Israel was considered an examplary beacon in its approach to lockdowns and vaccinations. For different lengths of time, people in Israel were:
· allowed to move about only in a certain perimeter of their home,
· public gatherings were limited or banned,
· schools and kindergartens were closed,
· subject to a mask mandate in all public sphere,
· immunization passes were in force for using numerous public facilities,
· tracked by intelligence services for establishing contacts of infected persons, until High Court outruled the measure.
What is little known though is how the Orthodox Jewish communities, the Haredim (sometimes called the Ultra-Orthodox), were allowed to carry on with their lives pretty much as usual – as noted by lan Ben Zion for an Associated Press report on February 1, 2021, many of their “schools, seminaries and synagogues” were kept “open”, “mass weddings and funerals [were held] in violation of lockdown restrictions”.
Close-knit and populous Orthodox communities suffered higher infection rates than the rest of the country, about 12% of the population accounting for up to 40% of the infections at periods of time. This is also meant that by them driving up the general rate, they were seen to contribute disproportionately to the factors determining the severity of policies at any given time. Studies have at times reported on this in the vein of their irrational faith and thinking, yet it is hard to imagine how would have the state been unable to intervene, for example, on a funeral where attendance reached hundreds or thousands, while it could have officers handing out fines for far smaller violations, by one witness even for not wearing a mask in an empty public park.

Craig Allen et al have described a pandemic-time Orthodox funeral in New York Times: “The crowd surged and swirled, like the eddies of an ocean. Crushed against one another, hundreds of men stretched their arms toward the rabbi’s body, trying to touch the bier in a display of religious devotion. [H]undreds of mourners, most with mouths uncovered, [attended a] funeral procession for a revered rabbi.”
The reality thus seems to speak of selective double standards where policies acclaimedly imposed for health reasons were excused for those with a specific religious and hence political status. This is, of course, not to say anything on the validity of the religious beliefs of the Orthodox Jews who should naturally have the full right to exercise their faith in their own country. Yet the situation does blur the line between the political and medical. An editorial of Times of Israel opined in February 2021 that liberties awarded to the Orthodox communities stemmed from PM Netanyahu’s unwillingness “to anger his Haredi [Orthodox] political partners, without whose support he [had] no hope of remaining in power.” If so, it would mean the government allowed a certain segment of population to be excused from measures heavily imposed on others by prioritizing their own continuing power as the overriding cause.
Notably, Ian Ben Zion’s aforementioned report described the funeral of a well-known rabbi Soloveitchik, in February 2021, “Densely packed throngs of people gathered outside the rabbi’s home, ignoring restriction on outdoor gatherings of more than 10 people. Thousands of black-garbed ultra-Orthodox funeral-goers coursed past the city’s [i.e. Jerusalem’s] many entrance. A handful of police officers blocked intersections to traffic to allow participants to pass, but appeared to take no action to prevent the illegal assembly. [This] came a day after police used a water cannon to disperse anti-Netanyahu protesters near the prime minister’s residence.”
Measures implemented over the Covid-19 pandemic are sure to deserve a rigorous re-examination, in the form of scientific as well as political analyses. It cannot be surmised that science would allow for political exemptions and thus Israel’s strategy with the Orthodox Jews poses a real question whether the policy was ever steered by science or whether ambitions of control were mixed into it from the very beginning. Israel hardened its grip on Orthodox Jews later in the pandemic, but never quite comparably to its prior treatment of the general public.