It is hard to imagine a more striking display of political tone-deafness than the government’s decision to allocate millions of shekels so that some 50,000 Israelis – many of them haredim defying draft notices – can travel to Uman this Rosh Hashanah.
This comes at a time when wave after wave of reservists are being mobilized again – leaving families behind, interrupting jobs, and risking their lives – while the state makes special arrangements so that young men who refuse to serve can bypass their travel bans and fly off on a state-subsidized spiritual holiday.
The symbolism could not be starker.
On one hand, a nation girding itself for an assault on Gaza City, with families bracing for another High Holy Day with relatives absent because they are on reserve duty. On the other hand, the spectacle of a government negotiating with Moldova to pay millions for the logistics of shuttling thousands of pilgrims – including those evading the draft – to pray at Rabbi Nachman’s grave in Ukraine.
If the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political establishment has often been accused since October 7 of being detached from the reality of what the country is going through, this move makes it seem as if the government itself is equally removed.
The argument in favor of the arrangement is that the pilgrimage to Uman is a deeply-rooted religious tradition that is spiritually important to tens of thousands, and – as a result – it should be facilitated as much as possible.
Shas leader Aryeh Deri and United Torah Judaism’s Yitzhak Goldknopf – whose parties have left the government but not the coalition as a result of the Knesset’s failure to pass a law institutionalizing military exemptions for yeshiva students – pressed the point with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, insisting that these are not leisure trips but acts of devotion.
Deri has been clear: Some 50,000 Israelis intend to make the pilgrimage, and without a framework, the government could face chaos at the airports as thousands of draft evaders are stopped.
Channel 12 reported this week that the IDF was planning a large-scale operation at the airport during the upcoming holiday season to detain haredim who have ignored military call-up notices.
Better to regulate it, Deri reportedly argued, than to let the situation erupt.
But the optics are terrible. To finance this trip, some NIS 10 million are reportedly being allocated from the budgets of multiple ministries to cover security and logistical costs in Moldova, where the pilgrims will fly into, and to subsidize the flights. Since Ukraine’s war with Russia, it has not been possible to fly directly to Ukraine; instead, one must fly to Moldova or Romania and then travel overland to Uman.
Israeli taxpayers underwriting flights of pilgrims, including those of draft dodgers
In effect, Israeli taxpayers – including reservists on their way to the front – will be underwriting the flights of the pilgrims, including those who refuse to don a uniform.
Opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Avigdor Liberman wasted no time in blasting the move, portraying it as the state sanctifying draft evasion in wartime.
They are not alone. Even Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer from the coalition’s Religious Zionist Party slammed the move, saying that “focusing on draft evaders who want to fly to Uman while tens of thousands are receiving emergency call-up orders and will be fighting in Gaza during the holidays is a complete disconnection from reality.”
For Netanyahu, the calculus is obvious: He depends on the ultra-Orthodox parties for his coalition’s survival.
Denying Deri on an issue so central to his base risks political rupture. But the prime minister must also know that a Likud-led government sending reservists to the battlefield while making possible the flight of draft dodgers to Uman is the kind of political weapon opponents will use against him in the next election.
This is not the first time the Uman pilgrimage has stirred heated debate. Since 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union,
Israelis have traveled there in large numbers on Rosh Hashanah, and controversies have followed. During the COVID years, for example, scores of haredim insisted on visiting the gravesite despite travel restrictions and fears of spreading the pandemic.
Once again, the pilgrimage is colliding with a national crisis. Coming in the shadow of October 7 and the war likely to intensify in Gaza, the government’s decision to ease travel restrictions for draft evaders and even subsidize their flights is – to many people – quite jarring. Reservists and their families are already voicing outrage.
The NIS 10 million price tag is not, in itself, unmanageable. Israel has spent vastly more on other symbolic and even questionable projects. But in politics, it is often not the cost but the symbolism that matters. At a moment when families are struggling with wartime inflation and the government insists there is no spare money for certain benefits, finding millions for Uman looks hard to justify.
Netanyahu has always prided himself on understanding political currents, on sensing where the public mood lies, which is why this decision is so surprising. He surely knows that opponents will turn this into a campaign battering ram.
One can easily imagine campaign ads come the next election: footage of reservists kissing their children goodbye at the bus stop, contrasted with young men in black coats boarding government-subsidized flights to Uman.
Since October 7, haredi politicians have often been accused of being insulated from the national mood, of carrying on as if the war were someone else’s burden. The Uman decision risks casting the government in the same light: insulated, calculating, and blind to the anger over the haredi conscription issue boiling over outside the coalition bubble.
There are, of course, defensible arguments. Facilitating the pilgrimage prevents ugly confrontations at Ben-Gurion Airport. It avoids scenes of mass arrests that could spiral out of control. But politics is not only about pragmatism; it is about perception. And the perception here is damaging.
It is also a reminder that wars tend to magnify tensions and societal fault lines that, in peacetime, do not loom as large. What might have been a minor quarrel in peacetime becomes explosive when soldiers are risking their lives.
The Uman pilgrimage has long been a source of controversy; this year, the issue has become even more pronounced.
Governments often stumble not over grand strategies but over small, symbolic decisions that expose public anger. Facilitating flights for draft evaders to Uman while calling up reservists for Rosh Hashanah may prove to be such a misstep. It brings into sharp focus frustrations about fairness, sacrifice, and political priorities.
Netanyahu may calculate that keeping Deri and Goldknopf content is worth the hit. But he should also calculate how the sight of young men boarding planes to Moldova – with the government’s blessing and wallet – will play when Israelis next go to the polls. Because when the campaign ads start rolling, Uman may loom far larger than he imagines.