Differing Solutions in response to the Supreme Court ruling

There were a number of solutions, each one very different from the other, that were proposed in response to yesterday's Supreme Court ruling declaring the supplementary income welfare given to kollel men to be discriminatory and illegal.

The supplementary income is something like 1000NIS per month given to kollel men who qualify. To qualify, the kollel wife must not work (in addition to the husband not working obviously), they must have 3 children (or more), and no car.

The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that continuing to give this money to haredi kollel men is discriminatory and illegal, since nobody else, specifically university students who would fall under the same qualifications, would receive this money.

University students used to get it as well, but it was taken away from them in the year 2000. It was still given to the kollel men, and at the time the Supreme Court, after having been petitioned on the basis of it being discriminatory, decided not to deal with the issue. Now, 10 years later, they have issued their ruling declaring it discriminatory. The determination is based on how the law giving them the money is structured.

Since this was a legal ruling, and not a governmental issue, I assume it will cause no coalition crisis, and is really just another elitist ruling made by the elitist Supreme Court who are more racist and discriminatory than any body in the country they will ever rule over.

I don't foresee much of an issue, because I expect our wonderful politicians to work it out so that if this money cannot be given this way it will simply be given another way. There is no lack of methods to funnel money to interest groups, and after some creative thinking I imagine it should not be much of a problem to find another way to get this money to the kollel guys.

I find the range of differing responses and solutions to be the interesting part of the story.

Shas members have said that they will work to make it non-discriminatory. They will change the law to say that anybody, even university students, can qualify for this money, under the same criteria. They say this knowing that there will be almost no university students qualifying for it. How many university students are there that are married with three or more children with no income (and no spousal income) and no car? Very few if any. So if they succeed in changing the law to include them, it will no longer be discriminatory, even if no university students will actually qualify for the money.

Rav Yuval Cherlo's response is that the issue of the money is discriminatory and the Supreme Court is correct. However, there is nothing wrong with a Jewish country having values that support learning, and perhaps some sort of priority system should be devised to support to a certain extent the study of Torah. At the same time, the haredi community should really be reorganizing their system so as to take less and less of such welfare moneys - to avoid a culture of destitution and to avoid chilul hashem as per the Rambam, and it not being the Torah way. That being said, this is not an issue for the Supreme Court, but the internal Torah community should be working this out on their own and it is wrong to force a system on a community.

The UTJ MKs simply ranted about the anti-haredi courts.

The gedolim voiced their concerns that Israel's only sustenance is really because it supports Torah learning. If they go the route of cutting out that support, Israel will not have a justification for its existence and will disintegrate. America will stop sending Israel money, and Israel will fall apart. Rav Shteinman and Rav Kanievsky supposedly said that every time the Israeli system takes away money from yeshivas and kollels, they have trouble with money from the USA.