At Two in the Morning: Inside the Economic Crisis of the Haredi Home

It is two o’clock in the morning. Only bats are awake now.

A small light glows in the living room of a modest apartment. At the table sits Rachel, needle and thread in hand, mending the garment before her at the end of a grueling day. She must finish the entire pile tonight. She is no night owl—tomorrow begins at six—but necessity leaves no room for complaint. She promised her customers a deadline; the repairs cannot be postponed again.

Akiva, her husband, is already asleep. He returned from the beis midrash two hours earlier, helped straighten out the house, prepared the children’s bags, and went to bed half an hour ago. Tomorrow will be demanding for him as well. A full day in kollel is no small matter. Add a long third study session, and the strain is real.

Rachel comes from a comfortable home. Her parents gave her seven hundred thousand shekels for the wedding. They bought an apartment in Jerusalem. They have five wonderful children. There are no complaints. There’s not much life, either.

Rachel is not a doctor or a psychologist. She never studied at university. She is not a programmer or an architect either. Not everyone is suited for those paths, and she always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Today she teaches kindergarten in the morning, works in an after-school program in the afternoon, and hems trousers late into the night. Her husband learns in kollel continuously and takes Dirshu exams. They do not eat out. They do not travel abroad. They do not own a car. Treats are reserved for Rosh Chodesh. And still Rachel must work ten hours a day just to survive the month.

 

An Untenable Situation

Some readers may find this portrait exaggerated. You may know kollel families for whom things are not quite so dire. Others may say that life is hard for everyone now. Indeed, prices are high. But what has happened in recent years borders on tragedy.

Do you know what a Haredi kindergarten teacher earns today? 6,500 shekels, after twenty years of seniority. Don’t ask how that makes sense. That is the reality. A homeroom teacher in an elementary school in the Chinuch Atzmai system can earn up to 7,000 shekels, assuming she holds a full-time position. Thousands of educators never reach that point and work for 3,000 shekels. It sounds unreal. It isn’t.

And teachers are not alone. Secretaries and cashiers, call-center workers and graphic designers—all in the same pit. Alongside a Haredi middle-class income woman earning twenty thousand shekels or more stands a lower class: tens of thousands of families with no way to make ends meet. None. In the not-so-distant past, austerity helped. Today, there is nothing left to cut. A family with four children in which the wife earns 7,000 (gross income) and her husband brings is 2,000 cannot pay a mortgage and shop for groceries. It cannot.

Since COVID, all Israelis have struggled financially, but kollel families have absorbed the hardest blow. They always lived on the edge—from Mishnat Yosef (discount community shopping) to apartment swaps as “vacations.” Now they have been pushed over the cliff.

Contrary to popular belief, Haredi families do not enjoy free education. That privilege is reserved for state schools. A kollel family pays, on average, 450 shekels per month for a child in a petur institution; a boy in yeshiva ketana can cost over 1,000 shekels a month. As for yeshiva gedola—let us not even begin.

The cancellation of daycare subsidies for draft-eligible families created unbearable pressure on young couples. Private childcare costs around 1,600 shekels per child per month, making work less financially viable than ever. Add the rising cost of after-school care, and “free education” becomes not even a joke.

Fifteen years ago, a Litvish kollel student with a 100,000-shekel mortgage was exceptional. Today, young couples are expected to take mortgages exceeding one million shekels for a house in Israel’s periphery

Mortgages have reached historic highs. Fifteen years ago, a Litvish kollel student with a 100,000-shekel mortgage was exceptional. Today, young couples are expected to take mortgages exceeding one million shekels for a house in Israel’s periphery. Renting? With what money?

And then there’s the cost of living. Infant formula is already a stretch; grapes and meat are luxuries. Discount sales help, but do not solve the problem. Before electricity, water, gas, and municipal taxes, all of them climbing steadily, the situation is untenable.

One can examine this empirically. The poverty line is misleading, as it is relative to national income.[1] Average household expenditure for a six-person Israeli family (around 25,000 shekels) also misleads, since Haredi norms are deliberately lower. A better benchmark is the legally defined “dignified subsistence” allowance for bankrupt individuals: bare survival, no luxuries. In 2025, that figure for a six-person family is approximately 14,300 shekels. Tell that to today’s kollel family.

If life is hard for dual high-income households, it is impossible for families living on half a salary. When there is no choice, solutions must be found. Cutting expenses worked, as I’ve mentioned, until nothing remained to cut. The only option left is increasing income.

 

Expanding Opportunities for Haredi Women

In the kollel household, the woman is the primary breadwinner. Logic dictates that maximizing her earning potential offers the greatest benefit with minimal disruption to the family’s way of life. Why, then, is reality so hostile to Haredi women?

A woman in the general population may pursue any profession she chooses: medicine, law, corporate leadership, or neuroscience. A Haredi woman is confined to a narrow list. She may study accounting, interior design, or even software engineering—only to discover she is paid less than a colleague with a degree. Most professions are closed to her.

There are objective challenges. Haredi women take more maternity leave than others; far more than men. Add pregnancy hours, nursing hours, sick children, and holidays—overtime is usually impossible. Productivity suffers, and this affects hiring and pay. But this is only a small part of the problem. The central issue is access: she simply cannot train for most professions.

There are two paths to professional training: Haredi seminaries or academia. Why do neither suffice? Why are seminary programs so monotonous? Why are there no gender-separated MA or PhD tracks?

Some blame lies with the seminaries (Haredi high school and post-high school institutions); they could broaden their offerings. But much of the responsibility lies with the state. The state urges Haredi women to work, yet only as low-wage labor for the general sector. A little like foreign workers.

Why can’t seminaries teach para-medical professions—physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology—fields in dire shortage that offer reasonable pay? Because the state does not allow it. These require study in general institutions, not Haredi ones.

So why not attend university? Thousands already do, but the majority don’t because of communal norms. One may debate their validity, but that debate will not help a public that follows rabbinic rulings. Mainstream Haredi leadership forbids academic study. The solution, for the present, is not there.

Even those who study remain second-tier. They may enter modestly paid professions, but truly lucrative fields—medicine, advanced engineering—remain mostly inaccessible. Supreme Court rulings bar gender-separated graduate study. Even women who are willing to attend university find advancement paths blocked.

These barriers deny not only knowledge but also access to well-paid public-sector jobs. Entry requirements often demand accredited graduate degrees, unattainable under current conditions.

Haredi politicians secured representation quotas in public service (7%), but neglected to check entry criteria. If positions require doctorates or master’s degrees, who benefits? A tiny elite. Not the mainstream.

Another obvious solution is fair pay, which seems to have become an outdated and boring concept. A Haredi kindergarten teacher should earn the same as her secular counterpart, rather than half, as though curriculum differences justify poverty wages. Teachers in Chinuch Atzmai are often fired annually to prevent seniority accumulation. This is a pipeline to poverty—and here, responsibility lies within the community itself.

 

“Let the Men Go Work!”

At this point, the reader may bristle: what about the men? Let them work. This point, too, is worthy of discussion.

A kollel man entering the workforce today will earn starvation wages at best. What should he do—stock shelves? Teach for pennies? Beg? He cannot study medicine or law. Mixed-gender environments are not an option for someone seeking to preserve his current spiritual standards. A Haredi woman can often work in mixed settings; a Haredi man far less so. Why? That deserves its own essay. Even programming through segregated tracks yields limited prospects for decent pay. The viable option becomes manual labor: plumbing, electrical work—woodchopping and water-drawing.

Still, one may insist: a low salary is still a salary. Let him work. Enough parasitism.

Many assume kollel men are idle, or that women secretly want their husbands to earn but are trapped by patriarchy. The reality is different

However, the matter is not so simple. Kollel couples are living the ideal into which they were born and educated. Many assume kollel men are idle, or that women secretly want their husbands to earn but are trapped by patriarchy. The reality is different. Women work ten hours a day willingly, sacrificing for their husband’s Torah. Men study from morning until midnight, with brief breaks, out of conviction and free choice. Both give their lives to Torah and take pride in it.

If we value Torah and honor a society of learners, we should strive to keep many of them learning. Moreover, sociologically, the result of driving them into low-income jobs would be disastrous. Instead of a learned society, we would create a servant class for the rest of the country. Two full-time workers earning less than one average salary—this makes no sense.

The result is creative desperation: women sewing, editing, typesetting, proofreading, data-entry, selling eggs, cleaning houses. Men, too, join in: many kollel students sit for two hours at night after a full day of study and do semi-Torah work—editing, formatting, and the like—just to add a few shekels.

This is not sane by any measure. We are not in the Middle Ages; slavery is illegal. It is intolerable that a person must work ten hours a day and more, only to scrape by in austerity. This is not right. Simply not right.

 

Flexibility and Creativity

The situation is changing. Boys’ education is shifting, allowing for greater skills and general education. Academic studies for women, and even for men, are becoming mainstream. More families are entering the middle class. Yet, change comes slowly, and in the current situation, I propose two paths that must operate in parallel.

Policymakers should stop talking about “integrating Haredim into the workforce” and start removing obstacles

First, policymakers—whether Haredi representatives or state institutions—should stop talking about “integrating Haredim into the workforce” and start removing obstacles. Eliminate barriers wrapped in the language of equality and oversight, and allow Haredi women to train for as many professions as possible with minimal value coercion. This can happen through seminaries, separate sex programs, vocational tracks, professional study alone, and minimal friction with other populations. Stop trying to “educate” us through the wallet.

This will require not only state effort. Seminaries will need maximal flexibility regarding professional curricula and program length. It will also demand creativity around the ban on academic degrees; the “equivalent degree” arrangement has worked reasonably well thus far. It is still preferable to passively anticipate the collapse of tens of thousands of families.

Second, it is time to rethink the stipend model for kollel students. Its roots lie in pre-World War I Lithuania, in institutions such as the Kovno Kollel under Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor: advanced scholars supported at a basic level to cultivate a new generation of rabbis and halachic decisors. Similar institutions arose elsewhere. The kollel model, as an established system, was built primarily in Eretz Yisrael after the Holocaust.

Historically, the stipend was a scholarship, not a salary. No one paid kollel students for “hours.” They learned, and those who valued their Torah supported them as best they could. With the flourishing of today’s kollel world, support has morphed into a kind of mini-salary: uniform stipends, rules of arrival and departure, and attendance requirements. Some places have fingerprint scanning or timecards. One element remains unchanged: the low sum, untouched for decades.

The Kovno Kollel was founded, among others, by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter from Slabodka. His son, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, founded Mir Yeshiva, home to Israel’s largest kollel. Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda did not pay a uniform stipend. There was a basic amount, and beyond that, students approached him, explained their needs, and received additional support accordingly. To this day, Mir preserves the institution of ha’ala’ah—an increased stipend. Yet today it runs by fixed criteria: number of children, seniority, and more. The current rosh yeshiva—also named Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel for his great-grandfather—formally “decides” each stipend, but in practice the office applies standard criteria regardless of personal circumstances. What also remains unchanged is the size of the stipend: a basic 1,050 shekels—just over one thousand shekels. It is, after all, a scholarship, not wages.

Assuming we are not about to double and triple stipends, index them, and halt their erosion by inflation, one option remains: a full return to the older model. A differential system.

Equal pay would be “fair” if this were wages; it is unfair when it is a scholarship. If he had enough money, he would fully support each learner

A salary is paid for work; a scholarship is paid according to need. It makes no sense to give a kollel student with six children and a wife who teaches kindergarten the same stipend as a kollel student with two children and a wife who is a programmer. If a rosh kollel has a fixed budget, he should distribute it by need, not equally. Equal pay would be “fair” if this were wages; it is unfair when it is a scholarship. If he had enough money, he would fully support each learner. When funds are limited, he must balance needs rather than hide behind uniformity that manufactures injustice.

I assume many readers will disagree with me on many points. This is an explosive subject, and everyone has an opinion—if only because it touches every home. The most important thing is that we keep speaking up, pushing for change, and refusing to let the issue slide. If my proposals are wrong in your eyes, propose your own. What matters is not who finds the solution, but that a solution is found.

The current situation is impossible.