{"id":27689,"date":"2010-12-28T19:39:11","date_gmt":"2010-12-29T03:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=27689"},"modified":"2010-12-28T20:05:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-29T04:05:00","slug":"yisroel-pensack-new-york-times-plays-catch-up-with-jewish-bloggers-on-israels-subsidy-payments-to-ultra-religious-jewish-men-for-full-time-torah-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=27689","title":{"rendered":"Yisroel Pensack: New York Times Plays &#8216;Catch Up&#8217; with Jewish Bloggers on Israel&#8217;s Subsidy Payments to Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men for Full-Time Torah Study"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This heavily-blogged topic is apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/29\/world\/middleeast\/29israel.html?ref=world&amp;pagewanted=all\">news<\/a> to The New York Times, which covers it at length today under the headline &#8220;Some Israelis Question Benefits for Ultra-Religious.&#8221; Isabel Kershner reports:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>JERUSALEM \u2014 Chaim Amsellem was certainly not the first Parliament member to  suggest that most ultra-Orthodox men should work rather than receive welfare  subsidies for full-time Torah study. But when he did so last month, the nation  took notice: He is a rabbi, ultra-Orthodox himself, whose outspokenness ignited  a fresh, and fierce, debate about the rapid growth of the ultra-religious in Israel.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTorah is the most important thing in the world,\u201d Rabbi Amsellem said in an  interview. But now more than 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not  work, compared with 15 percent in the general population, and he argued that  full-time, state-financed study should be reserved for great scholars destined  to become rabbis or religious judges.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThose who are not that way inclined,\u201d he said, \u201cshould go out and earn a  living.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In reaction, he was ousted from his own ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, whose  leaders vilified him with such venom that he was assigned a bodyguard. The party  newspaper printed a special supplement describing Rabbi Amsellem as \u201cAmalek,\u201d  the biblical embodiment of all evil&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This heavily-blogged topic is apparently news to The New York Times, which covers it at length today under the headline &#8220;Some Israelis Question Benefits for Ultra-Religious.&#8221; Isabel Kershner reports: JERUSALEM \u2014 Chaim Amsellem was certainly not the first Parliament member &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=27689\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,37,31,169,18,590,18818],"tags":[1320,24803,24805,24802,24800,19378,24806,24801,24804],"class_list":["post-27689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-israel","category-judaism","category-new-york-times","category-orthodoxy","category-torah","category-yisroel-pensack","tag-amalek","tag-benefits","tag-full-time-torah-study","tag-isabel-kershner","tag-r-chaim-amsellem","tag-shas-party","tag-ultra-orthodox-men","tag-ultra-religious","tag-welfare-subsidies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27704,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689\/revisions\/27704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}