Ynet is reporting on a study led by Dr. Michal Shaul that claims that the Holocaust is the cause of the tremendous growth and development of the Haredi world.

According to Shaul, "In the early 20th century, the world of Torah was in a deep crisis. Jewish Orthodoxy was nearly extinct. It was consumed by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, Zionism and Socialism, and there was a major shift towards those movements. According to estimates, there were only several thousand yeshiva students in Eastern Europe before the war. It was the huge destruction which caused Holocaust survivors to take urgent action, she says. They realized that it was 'to be or not to be. When the survivors saw that almost the entire world of Torah had gone up in flames after the war, and upon the establishment of the secular State of Israel, religious leaders and common people came to the conclusion that they to fight to restore the world of Torah. It's likely that without the Holocaust, the world of Torah would have become extinct."

I do not know if one might also claim, as the flip side to the claim of Dr Shaul that the Holocaust is the cause of Haredi growth and development, that the reason for the Holocaust was in order to save the Torah world and Haredi Jewry from decimation and extinction. It seems like the logical next step, but I don't know. It is way above my pay grade to say such a thing, and it hurts me to even think it.