For over a century, Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the United States have supported a few of their best and brightest would-be rabbis, giving them stipends to study the Talmud. But what's happened among Israel's haredim in recent decades is that all males are expected to become full-time students. Their proponent, Rabbi Eliezer Shach, a leader of the religious right, argues that only if all the men are funneled into the system and insulated from modern life will first-rate Talmudic scholars emerge. Arranged to wed. There is one economic incentive for haredi men to excel in their studies.
Arranged marriages are still a haredi norm.
Most haredi men marry women with career prospects as bleak as their own. Like the men, the women are forbidden by haredi leaders from studying at universities, for fear they will be brainwashed by secularist teachers. None of the hundreds of high school youth educated at Jerusalem's Ateres Yisrael Yeshiva are allowed to take exams that lead to admission to universities. But the education they receive, says Rabbi Baruch Mordechai Ezrahi, who runs the yeshiva, is rigorous. But this could not be further from the truth.