When hundreds of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protesters descended on Modi’in last week to prevent military police from arresting a draft evader, Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer saw a dispute that had gone badly off course. He opposes the arrest of yeshiva students as a tool for enforcing enlistment, arguing that it creates friction and strengthens extremists. But the organized effort to prevent the arrest disturbed him just as much.
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“This is not just opposition to serving in the army. This is also lawlessness,” Pfeffer told The Media Line.
Pfeffer chairs the rabbinic committee of the Haredi Public party, a new political party led by Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Moti Leitner. The party is seeking a place in the Knesset in Israel’s October 27 election, appealing to ultra-Orthodox voters who identify strongly with Torah life but no longer feel adequately represented by Shas or United Torah Judaism.
Leitner’s political experience began at the municipal level. In 2024, he led the Derech faction to two seats on the Beit Shemesh City Council, campaigning on education, employment, housing, and representation for Haredim whose needs he believed were being neglected.
The national movement emerged this year after its founders sought greater representation within the established haredi parties. When that effort failed to produce an agreement, they launched an independent electoral campaign.
Leitner says the decision grew out of problems he had encountered in Beit Shemesh long before election season: families struggling to make ends meet, limited employment opportunities, shortcomings in education, and an increasingly difficult housing market. Then came October 7.
For Leitner, the Hamas attack turned a social argument into a question of responsibility. He said haredi society had spent years trying to preserve a separate way of life, but parts of that separation had hardened into detachment from the rest of the country.
In his view, the result hurt both haredim and Israel. He said a community that makes up a large and growing share of the Jewish population cannot expect others to carry the burden of defense, economic productivity, and national institutions indefinitely.
The parrty is not interested in winning approval from secular Israeli community
Leitner describes that message primarily as an internal haredi reckoning, not an effort to win approval from secular Israelis. He wants a community that can finance its own institutions, support Torah study through a stronger economy, and rely less on government subsidies or fundraising abroad.
Military responsibility fits into the same idea. Haredi families, he said, cannot assume that other Israelis will always be the ones sent to protect their children, neighborhoods, and cities.
That political argument places Haredi Public inside the Israeli right rather than between the country’s competing political blocs. Leitner told The Media Line that he wants a right-wing, national, and conservative government on economic, diplomatic, and security issues.
He said he would be comfortable joining a government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also favoring a broader national coalition built around those principles.
The party’s difference with the established haredi leadership becomes sharper on military service.
Haredi Public says men genuinely committed to full-time Torah study should remain protected. It does not extend that principle automatically to everyone enrolled in a yeshiva.
Pfeffer said some institutions keep men who are not serious full-time students largely to avoid military service.
“Those institutions are not legitimate,” he said. “Boys who are not in full-time Torah study have to be in the army.”
The dispute comes against a difficult legal background. In June 2024, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government lacked a legal basis for continuing the longstanding exemption arrangements for haredi yeshiva students. In April 2026, the court ordered additional enforcement measures against men avoiding the draft.
The Knesset subsequently approved temporary legislation in July intended to suspend certain enforcement measures against full-time yeshiva students. However, the Supreme Court issued an interim order preventing that law from taking effect while its legality was examined.
The ongoing dispute has put haredi politicians under pressure from religious leaders seeking to preserve yeshiva study and from other Israelis demanding greater military service participation.
Haredi Public proposes a distinction between students genuinely pursuing full-time Torah scholarship and those whose primary occupation lies elsewhere. Under its platform, men in the second category would be expected to undertake military or other qualifying security service through arrangements compatible with haredi religious life.
Who decides which men qualify for exemptions is where the proposal becomes more difficult.
Pfeffer does not want the decision left entirely to haredi institutions, where he believes internal pressures and political deals could affect the process. He supports a designated state body, with criteria and quotas during an initial transition.
Such a system would require legislation establishing who qualifies for deferment or exemption and how the rules would be enforced.
Pfeffer’s goal is a system in which military service becomes ordinary for haredi men who are not suited to years of full-time Torah study, rather than a choice that carries a social stigma.
Pfeffer himself served in the military after October 7. He said Israelis outside the community often underestimate what enlistment means for a young haredi man.
Separate units, stricter kosher standards, and other accommodations matter, but they do not resolve the deeper issue. The army has been one of the institutions most closely tied to Israeli identity since the state’s founding.
For thousands of haredi men, entering it would change more than where they spend several years. It would alter how part of the community sees itself.
'Partnership' over 'equality'
That is why Pfeffer prefers the word “partnership” to “equality.”
“What we care about is partnership,” he said. “A demand not of equality, but a demand of partnership.”
Under that formula, Israel could keep a significant number of serious Torah scholars in yeshiva while expecting many others to serve, including in regular military units.
Pfeffer also welcomed proposals for yeshiva-based security frameworks that combine study with defense duties, calling the idea “a positive creative idea.”
The disagreement with the established haredi parties goes beyond the draft.
Pfeffer says Haredi Public’s rabbinic committee is not meant to replicate the structure of Shas or United Torah Judaism, where senior rabbis exercise decisive authority over political representatives.
In the new party, he said, rabbis advise and guide, but elected officials don't simply carry out instructions.
“The lay leadership is not there just to carry out the instruction of the rabbis,” he said.
Pfeffer knows some of the rabbis connected to the traditional parties but said there has been no meaningful dialogue with their leadership since the new party was formed.
He also believes the established political leadership has damaged the way haredi society is viewed outside its own communities.
When Israelis asked for more haredi participation in defense, education, and the economy, Pfeffer said, the response from parliament too often sounded like “a flat no.”
That has consequences, he said, because political representatives become the public face of a much larger population.
“That answer creates not just friction and tension, but also anger, resentment, even animosity.”
Ziva Glanz, fourth on the party’s candidate list, approaches the same problem from another part of Haredi life.
She spent years working in housing, infrastructure, economic development, and immigrant absorption, and said the traditional haredi parties never fully represented her.
Many haredim already work, study, and participate in the wider economy, she said, but the political priorities associated with the community have not always followed them there.
“They wanted to be part of society. They wanted to contribute to Israel,” Glanz said. “They don’t see themselves as the haredi problem.”
Her presence on the list also breaks with a longstanding feature of haredi national politics.
Glanz is one of two women among Haredi Public’s top four candidates. The other, Dr. Nechumi Yaffe, a scholar of haredi society and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, is third on the list.
Their inclusion marks a departure from the practices of Shas and United Torah Judaism, which do not place women on their Knesset candidate lists.
Glanz argues that women taking responsibility inside haredi society is hardly new.
“Women have been at the forefront of haredi society already now for 20 years,” she said. “They are the main breadwinners in their families. They’re running companies, they’re running organizations, they’re running schools.”
What they have lacked, she said, is a seat in the political institutions that make decisions affecting them.
Education is one of the areas where Glanz and Leitner see the existing system as too restrictive.
Glanz wants haredi children to have access to mathematics and English starting in elementary school, along with more state-haredi schools, secondary yeshivas that offer general studies, and higher education programs adapted to religious requirements.
Leitner frames the issue partly as parental choice. He said haredi parents who want state-haredi education often cannot find it because local structures refuse to open the schools they are asking for.
The party’s educational proposals also reflect its economic priorities. Its leaders want more haredi men and women to gain the qualifications needed for stable employment while maintaining religious observance and supporting Torah-study institutions.
Leitner remains firmly Orthodox in his understanding of Israel as a Jewish state, but he also criticizes religious coercion.
On disputes involving different Jewish movements or issues such as public policy on Shabbat, he said the government should recognize that Israelis do not all live by the same religious standards.
In some cases, he argued, transferring authority from the national government to municipalities could reduce conflict.
He was particularly critical of haredi politicians who, in his view, have made Israelis more hostile toward religious institutions by relying too heavily on coercion.
Glanz sees October 7 as part of the reason those older boundaries have become less rigid.
Before the attack, she said, secular and haredi Israelis often behaved as if they were standing in opposite corners of a “boxing match.”
The emergency brought people from different communities into the same volunteer centers and civilian operations.
She calls the network that emerged a kind of “citizen government,” where secular Israelis, hasidim, and everyone between them worked together because the immediate task mattered more than their political disagreements.
Whether that spirit of cooperation can be translated into electoral support remains an open question.
Haredi Public faces established parties with longstanding religious leadership structures, extensive political organizations, and loyal voting constituencies.
It must also clear Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold to win a seat in the 120-member Knesset.
Several national surveys published in late September and early October did not show the new party crossing that threshold. A separate survey of young voters aged 18 to 22, published by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, indicated stronger support among that age group, equivalent to five seats if its preferences were reflected in the electorate as a whole.
The findings suggest the party’s message may resonate with some younger voters, but a survey limited to that age group cannot establish its support across the electorate.
For now, Haredi Public is trying to persuade voters that its proposals protect traditional haredi life while addressing problems its leaders believe the established parties have neglected.
Asked where he wants haredi society to be in another decade, Leitner did not describe a community with less Torah study.
He described one economically strong enough to sustain it, while tens of thousands more haredim work, serve, and take part in the institutions responsible for the country’s security.
For Leitner, the test is not whether haredim become less haredi. It is whether they can stop depending on other Israelis to carry responsibilities that a growing community will increasingly have to carry for itself.