Does the State of Israel Try to Force Secular Education in Charedi Schools?

The answer is unequivocally yes — and right now, in the run-up to the 2026 elections, the most explicit attempt yet is being placed on the table. For two decades the state has used legislation, the courts, and above all the leverage of funding to push secular studies into Charedi schools. It is dressed up as "universal standards" and "concern for the children." Underneath the wrapping is a single question, and everyone involved knows it: who holds the chinuch of Klal Yisrael — Torah leaders, or the state?

This is not a Charedi suspicion in search of evidence. It is a documented, recurring campaign, and its newest and boldest chapter is being announced from the podium as this is written.

I. A Recurring Campaign of Pressure

The clearest case came in 2013, when the Yesh Atid party, then holding the finance and education portfolios, pushed through a law conditioning state funding on secular studies. Charedi elementary institutions and yeshivos ketanos that declined to teach roughly ten to eleven hours a week of a core curriculum would see their budgets cut sharply — from the 55 percent of a compliant school's funding they had received down to 35 percent. The mechanism was the one the state reaches for every time: not an outright ban, which it cannot impose, but financial strangulation of the institutions that serve hundreds of thousands of children.

That law did not survive a court; it survived until the next coalition. After the 2015 elections, the Charedi parties made its repeal a condition of joining the government, and the funding penalty was rolled back, with discretion over these budgets returned to the Education Ministry. The episode is worth remembering for one detail in particular: the education minister who advanced the repeal was Naftali Bennett — the very man who had earlier supported the Yesh Atid law, and the very man who today, campaigning again, has made forcing the core curriculum on Charedim a centerpiece of his platform. The position changes with the political wind; the pressure itself never goes away. Across the years it has resurfaced as conditional funding, as petitions to the High Court seeking to tie state support to "national educational standards," and as ever-heavier demands for inspections, attendance data, and proof of secular instruction.

II. Bennett's Promise: The Threat Made Explicit

If anyone doubted that the goal is coercion, the doubt was removed in June 2026. Speaking at the Israel Democracy Institute's conference, former prime minister Naftali Bennett — now leading a slate into the coming elections — unveiled what he called a plan for a "unified national education system," and described it, without understatement, as "the greatest social revolution since the establishment of the state."

The details are not subtle. Every school receiving public funding would be required to devote at least 60 percent of its instructional time to a fixed list of core subjects — Hebrew, English, mathematics, Bible studies, civics, and Zionism. And state funding would be ended outright for the "independent and party-affiliated institutions" that decline — which is to say, for the Charedi school networks as they exist. The stated aim is to fold "all parts of Israeli society" into "one Israeli story." This came months after a February broadside in which Bennett denounced Charedi education as anti-Zionist, accused a third of Jewish first-graders of attending schools that "incite against the state," and framed the entire Torah-chinuch system as a workforce failure and an economic burden — a characterization the Charedi community across the spectrum condemned as persecution dressed for an election season.

Strip away the language of "revolution" and "one story," and what remains is an ultimatum: teach what the state dictates for the majority of your children's day, or the state will defund the education of your children entirely. That is not the offer of a partner. It is the demand of a sovereign over the soul of the next generation. For the moment, the Charedi parties' place in the governing coalition has held this off — the 2026 budget in fact secured the funding of the Torah institutions — but the threat is now stated openly, and an election stands between it and law.

III. Why the State's Curriculum Is the Problem

It would be a mistake to imagine, as the slogans suggest, that this is a quarrel over whether children should learn arithmetic. The reasons the Torah world keeps its chinuch in its own hands are set out fully elsewhere in this series — including the fact, often missed, that a serious Talmudic education is itself a rigorous training in logic, mathematics, and commercial law. The objection here is narrower and sharper: it is to this curriculum, designed by this establishment, carrying its worldview into the formation of Torah children.

Consider what the state's program actually transmits. Its civics strand advances a pluralist vision in which every expression of Jewishness — Reform, secular, humanist — is presented as an equally valid "Judaism," and a values-framework is taught as settled truth on questions where it stands squarely against halacha. Eilu v'eilu divrei Elokim Chayim refers to the give-and-take of Torah scholars inside the mesorah; it was never a license to teach a child that every ideology is interchangeable with the Torah of Sinai. Its history is the historiography of secular Zionism, in which Jewish survival is a story of Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, of armies and statesmen, with emunah and hashgacha written out and the Torah leaders who actually shaped the nation — Rav Chaim Ozer, the Chazon Ish, the Brisker Rav — absent from the page. Its literature carries, even where nothing is explicit, the steady normalization of a life lived outside the Torah's boundaries. Its science is taught not as the study of Hashem's world but inside a frankly materialist frame, evolution presented as undirected fact with no Creator in view — and let it be clear, as we have said before, that the Torah world is not "anti-science"; it objects to a godless framework, not to knowledge of creation. And its social studies quietly install secular Israeli culture as the normal, the modern, the aspirational — the very horizon a Torah chinuch exists to lift a child above.

These are not neutral inputs that happen to take a few hours. They are a formation, and it is a formation in someone else's image.

IV. The Real Question: Who Holds the Jewish Soul

This is why the Torah world will not yield on it, whatever the price. When the State of Israel was founded, even David Ben-Gurion understood that you cannot compel a Jew to raise his children against his own way of life, and pledged that each community would be free to educate according to its tradition. That compact is precisely what the current campaign seeks to break — and to break it through the one pressure point a poor community cannot easily ignore, its funding.

The Charedi answer was given long before the present fight, when the gedolim built an independent Torah-education system for exactly this reason: so that the chinuch of Jewish children would never sit in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach insisted that the purpose of that chinuch is to raise servants of Hashem, not to manufacture citizens shaped to the state's specifications, and that its purity is not negotiable. The Chazon Ish, who laid the foundations of that independent system, understood that mixing kodesh and chol under an external mandate would corrode the mesorah it claimed to enrich. And Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman gave the principle its starkest form: better that the Torah world remain poor and whole than accept the state's coin and surrender the soul of its children with it. That readiness — to forgo the money rather than the mesorah — is the entire answer to a strategy built on the money.

V. The Bottom Line

So, does the state try to force secular education on Charedi schools? It has tried by legislation, it has tried through the courts, it has tried with the budget, and it is now being promised, in the plainest terms yet, by a candidate who calls it a revolution. The Charedi world does not refuse out of contempt for knowledge — its children spend their lives mastering one of the most demanding disciplines ever devised. It refuses because what is being demanded is not knowledge but control: the authority to decide what fills a Jewish child's day, and in whose image he is formed.

That authority belongs to the Torah and to those who carry it — not to a ministry, a court, or a campaign. The chinuch of Klal Yisrael was entrusted to us at Sinai, and it is not the state's to take.

May the chinuch of our children remain pure and in faithful hands, may those who lead Klal Yisrael guard it with wisdom and courage, and may we raise a generation loyal to the Torah of Sinai — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The legislative and political record

• The 2013 Yesh Atid core-curriculum law, conditioning state funding on roughly 10–11 weekly hours of secular studies and reducing non-compliant Charedi institutions' budgets from 55% to 35% of the standard; its rollback after the 2015 elections as a Charedi coalition condition, with discretion returned to the Education Ministry
• Naftali Bennett's reversal — from supporting the 2013 law, to advancing its repeal as education minister, to campaigning in 2026 to impose it
• Bennett's June 2026 "unified national education system" plan (Israel Democracy Institute conference): a requirement that publicly funded schools devote at least 60% of instruction time to core subjects (Hebrew, English, mathematics, Bible, civics, Zionism) and an end to state funding for independent and party-affiliated institutions that decline; and his February 2026 public denunciation of Charedi education
• The 2026 state budget, which secured continued funding for Charedi educational institutions under the governing coalition
• The longstanding compact, dating to Ben-Gurion, that each community would educate its children according to its own way of life

The positions of the Gedolim on the autonomy of chinuch

• Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach (Michtavim u'Maamarim) — that Torah chinuch exists to raise servants of Hashem, not citizens shaped to the state's mold, and that its purity is not for sale
• The Chazon Ish — the founder of the independent Torah-education system, established precisely to keep the chinuch of Jewish children out of state hands
• Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman — the readiness to forgo state funding rather than surrender the soul of Torah chinuch

The structural relationship to other articles in this series

• "Why Do Charedim Avoid Secular Education in Chadarim and Yeshivos?" — the hashkafic foundation, and what a Talmudic education actually teaches
• "What Is the Charedi View on How Taxes Are Spent by the State?" — funding leverage as a weapon against Torah institutions
• "How the Secular Establishment Seeks to Assimilate Charedim Through the Draft" — the same battle on a different front
• "What Is the Charedi View of the State's Government Legitimacy?" — authority, and its limits, over the Jewish soul