Jonathan Rosenblum is feeling guilty talking about the tragic death of Sgt. Ari Weiss, the 21-year-old son of American-born Susie and Stuart Weiss; Stuart is Rosenblum’s fellow columnist at The Jerusalem Post. Although Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem, his seven sabra sons won’t ever serve in the Israeli army, like a full 10 percent of the pool of draft-age Jews. Instead, they will spend their military years studying in yeshivot, safely away from the battlefield.

“I felt guilty in Hyde Park, Illinois, too,” says Rosenblum in his office, where he heads Jewish Media Resources, a public relations firm determined to improve the public image of haredim, Israel’s extremely religious Jews.

Rosenblum grew up in a Conservative home. After graduating from The University of Chicago and Yale Law School, a spiritual quest brought him and his wife, Judith, to Israel and to “the integrity of living life before God.” They are following the strictest interpretations of Judaism and bringing up their children to become Torah scholars. Of their nonservice in the military, Rosenblum says, “I try to instill the sensitivity that if they aren’t serving they need to invest the same intensity in what they’re doing for the Jewish people. When they study Torah, they should do it as intensely as a combat soldier does his training.”

But despite all the ruckus in the press and by political parties such as Labor, Meretz and Shinui about haredim not serving, the Knesset passed the Tal Law that minimizes their obligations for all forms of national service. The law was slated to go into effect in the summer of 2002 but was postponed. In the meantime, elections in January 2003 more than doubled Knesset representation of Shinui, a political party that galvanized resentment against haredim and promised voters to derail the new law.

“The decrease in haredi seats is good in some ways,” Rosenblum says. “With our reduced political power, the criticism has become less pronounced.”

Israel Eichler, a newly elected Knesset member from the Torah Judaism Party and a television personality, waves away Shinui’s surge as a passing moment of Jewish self-hatred. “Deep down Israelis don’t really want yeshiva students to turn up in the induction office,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent are happy that Jews like us exist, so they can be as irreligious as they like and still be assured that someone is preserving authentic Judaism.”

Is Eichler engaging in wishful thinking, or do Israelis have a soft spot for haredim? Is it a sweeping resentment or an appreciative understanding?

Neither. It is ambivalence, according to Eliahu Katz, a professor of sociology and communications at Hebrew University and a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Katz, together with Shlomit Levy and Hanna Levinsohn, is coauthor of “A Portrait of Israeli Jewry,” an in-depth study of beliefs, observances and values among Israelis conducted in 2000 by the Guttman Center of Jerusalem’s Israel Democracy Institute for the Avi Chai Foundation.

“We have to back up a step and look at our confusion of ethnicity and religion,” Katz says. The study reveals that Israelis are more traditional than you would think. Only 5 percent consider themselves “antireligious.” More than half the population believes that the “Torah and religious precepts are Divine commandments,” 85 percent have a Passover Seder and a full 98 percent have a mezuza on the front door.

“We have many people doing things out of a sense of Jewish peoplehood and traditional sentimentality,” Katz admits. “They look at haredim as a kind of embodiment of what seems to be a purer religious life, an authentic expression of what Judaism was once like.”

Examples abound of the ambiguity Israelis feel about haredim. Polls showed that they overwhelmingly preferred Prime Minister Ariel Sharon build his coalition with Shinui rather than with haredi parties. But at last year’s Independence Day ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the loudest cheers were for haredi activist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of Zaka, who lit one of the 12 torches. The same people who malign haredim write books about them that become best sellers, exposing problems but also portraying some characters warmly. Repertoires at elite Tel Aviv theaters usually include at least one play about haredim, and a new, sympathetic television soap opera, The Rebbe’s Court, has gotten excellent ratings.

Who are Israel’s haredim? There are no exact figures, but most sources estimate they are between 400,000 and 500,000—men and women with lots of children. Haredi means God-fearing, and for the most part haredim are the continuation of European religious movements. They follow fastidious observance of Jewish law and rejection of secular culture. There are no televisions in their homes, nor do they go to movies. Their greatest fear is that their children will be lured into a secular lifestyle they see as decadent. The children go to schools segregated by gender and emphasize religious subjects over math, science and history. Haredim have a thriving subculture with their own newspapers and religious rock concerts, where men and women sit separately.

To the outsider, all haredim may look alike, the men in their dark suits and large hats, the women in long skirts, sleeves past the elbows and hair covered. There are many groups among them, such as the Belz, Gur and Vishnitz Hasidim, and the mitnagdim who continue the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition. Both have considerable political clout because they vote in blocs. In addition, there are haredi Sefardim, hippyish returnees to the faith and nationalist religious Jews who have become more stringent. When in Israel’s early years Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion initially granted yeshiva students exemption from military service, it was because of an understanding of the rabbis’ desire to reestablish the yeshivot after the Holocaust and also because the pragmatic prime minister needed their votes. Back then there were a mere few hundred yeshiva students.

Haredi women are not obligated to perform military or alternative volunteer service and can go to work outside the home. Until the Tal Law, named for past Supreme Court Justice Zvi Tal, who headed the nine-person committee appointed by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, men who dropped out of yeshiva were subject to the draft. That kept even those who weren’t passionate students in yeshiva. Married, full-time students had been receiving a monthly government stipend of approximately $300, which annoyed the Israeli taxpayer, who does not view yeshiva study as equivalent to holding a job. This has recently been cut back 40 percent.

Their large families are assisted by government child allowances, although that, too, was recently cut back 60 percent. Even before the cuts, many haredim lived below the poverty line.

The Tal Law also stipulates that yeshiva students can defer army service until age 23, when they have a year to decide between continued Torah study or getting a job. Those who opt for employment will serve shorter army service than regular recruits before becoming civilians.

The resentment against the stipends, the Tal Law and the military exemptions were central campaign issues for Shinui, which expanded from six to fifteen seats under the leadership of Yosef (Tommy) Lapid to become Israel’s third largest party. Despite election promises, the Tal Law remains on the books; a coalition accord agreed that a new arrangement would replace it, but no final plan has emerged.

Even resentful Israelis accept the important contribution of the haredim to Jewish demography, according to Yitzhak Ravid, author of The Demographic Revolution, published by the Institute of Policy and Strategy of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. “With a 3.5 percent growth rate, they are the only sector in Israeli society that nearly matches the Muslim growth rate of 3.6 percent,” he observes. “You have to appreciate that.”

Also generating positive feelings are the large number of haredi charitable groups. Some extend to the general population, like the ones that provide sandwiches for the families of patients in hospitals, summer camps for cancer kids and Yad Sarah, the free-loan society for home medical equipment. Yad Sarah’s founder, Uri Lupolianski, Jerusalem’s new mayor, is admired by secular Jews.

The images of haredi men of Zaka doing the grisly work of collecting body parts after terrorist attacks has won respect and good will. Zaka members were in Turkey after the November 15 terrorist bombing of two shuls. “Meshi-Zahav is nothing less than a national hero,” says Anat Mordechai, a senior writer for the secular La’Isha, Israel’s largest women’s magazine. She adds with a laugh, “He’s so much a hero we don’t consider him haredi anymore.”

Joking aside, Israelis on the whole want to ameliorate what they see as the central source of friction in Israeli society. A whopping 82 percent rated relations between observant and nonobservant poor. What can be done to reduce the negative feelings and build on the positive?

Ravid is one among many who look to haredim entering the work force as part of the solution. “People feel the lack of employment by one sector holds the whole economy back,” he asserts.

This may be easier said than done. “Many haredim in my own family would go directly into the labor market,” says Tzvia Greenfield, author of Cosmic Fear: The Rise of the Religious Right in Israel (Yedioth Ahronoth Books). “But what could they do? They aren’t trained for work.” Greenfield worries that the Tal Law will simply result in demands for more government patronage.

Others, like Rosenblum, insist the haredim will adjust quickly. “They’re not dropouts,” he says. “They’re in school studying different subjects, so they’re able to make the switchover. I’ve seen haredi kids catch up quickly on high school math when they needed to pass an exam.”

Women will make the transition to college more easily than men because they already get a more rounded education, according to Adina Bar-Shalom, founder of the Haredi College for women and the daughter of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Some boys high schools have introduced a stronger general curriculum, and Bar-Shalom hopes that a year of pre-academic training— already embraced by the Ministry of Education—will enable men, too, to integrate well into college.

“The revolution is coming,” Bar-Shalom avows. “We need to ease tensions in Israeli society and we need to bring haredim into the modern world.”