Gafni slams plan to verify yeshiva attendence
Leaders of the United Torah Judaism Party reacted furiously on Sunday to attempts by the Education Ministry to clamp down on fraudulent reporting of student attendance at ultra-Orthodox yeshivas.
Yeshiva students who obtain exemptions from military service do so on the basis of studying at least 45 hours a week at an institution authorized by the Defense Ministry. However, it is believed that large numbers of those students do not in fact turn up to study.
In 2016, the IDF revoked the exemptions of some 4,000 individuals whom it discovered were not studying as the yeshivas had declared.
Last year, the Education Ministry received authorization from the State Attorney’s Office to employ private investigators to probe the phenomenon and physically visit the yeshivas registered with the Defense Ministry to determine if the declared number of students were actually studying there.
The ministry is now poised to send out the investigators, infuriating senior UTJ MK Moshe Gafni, who wrote to Education Minister Naftali Bennett protesting the measure.
Gafni penned a broadside against the head of Education Ministry’s Department for Torah Institutions, accusing him of failing to advocate or help yeshivas and, in contrast to other department heads and ministry directors, failing to request budget increases for his department in the Knesset Finance Committee.
He said there would be a public outcry if private investigators were sent to universities or other public educational institutions, adding that he would not tolerate them being sent to yeshivas.
“Private investigators who do not go to parallel institutions won’t go to yeshivas,” Gafni wrote. “And even though the director of your department tries the whole time to give them [yeshivas] an image of thieves, [that] will not only not help, but it is causing great damage to the Torah world,” Gafni wrote to Bennett.