Why don’t Haredim serve?

The Haredim were excused from military service in 1949 by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. At the time, there were only 400 yeshiva students in all of Israel, and Ben-Gurion agreed that these young men should be allowed to study Torah full-time, in order to revive the tradition of yeshiva scholarship that had been all but wiped out in the Holocaust. But now there are nearly 1 million Haredim in Israel, and the exemption is seen as unfair by other citizens. “Why should the Haredi mother have her sons around her dinner table, while the secular mother has sleepless nights?” asks Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer. All other Jewish Israelis must serve. (Israeli Arabs are exempt, as are religious Druze.)