The Tragic Similarities Of Haredi Leadership Before & After the Holocaust
The Rabbis Who Cannot See Tomorrow: The Tragic Similarities Between Haredi Leadership Before the Holocaust and Haredi Leadership in Israel Today
The greatest failure of Jewish leadership is not that it makes mistakes. Every generation makes mistakes. The greatest failure is the inability to recognize that history is changing, that the Jewish people face dangers their ancestors never confronted in precisely the same form, and that yesterday’s answers may become tomorrow’s catastrophe. A leader who cannot imagine the future is not protecting tradition. He is gambling with it. And when that leader claims to speak in the name of Torah, his failure becomes more dangerous, because he can transform his own limitations into religious obligations for an entire community.
There is something deeply disturbing about the similarities between the mindset of significant elements of today’s Haredi rabbinic leadership in Israel and the mindset of certain Orthodox rabbinic authorities in prewar Europe. The comparison is not that the circumstances are identical, that every prewar rabbi failed, or that today’s Haredi Jews face a Holocaust. They do not. The comparison concerns something more fundamental: a style of leadership that can become so absorbed in preserving an established communal order that it loses the ability to confront a changing world, prepare the next generation, and acknowledge dangers that do not fit comfortably within its inherited assumptions.
The Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century was not caused by rabbis, nor could rabbis have stopped Hitler by issuing different religious rulings. Nazi Germany and its collaborators bear responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. Yet the historical record raises difficult questions about the responses of some Jewish leaders to the gathering danger. There were rabbis who warned, rabbis who organized rescue, rabbis who urged emigration, rabbis who struggled heroically to save their communities, and rabbis who themselves perished while trying to protect their people. There were also leaders who underestimated the threat, discouraged particular forms of escape, or could not imagine that European Jewish civilization might be destroyed on a scale previously unimaginable. To remember the first group while refusing to examine the failures of the second is not reverence for Jewish history. It is an evasion of its lessons.
The central question is brutally simple: What happens when religious leadership mistakes the preservation of its existing way of life for the preservation of the Jewish people?
That question should haunt every serious Haredi leader in Israel today.
Before the war, much of European Jewry lived in a world in which religious authority, communal custom, and inherited social structures were central to Jewish life. For many Orthodox leaders, the rise of secular Zionism was not simply a political development. It was a theological challenge. Jewish nationalism outside the traditional rabbinic framework threatened the authority of the old communal order. Some rabbis feared that secular education would lead to assimilation, that modern political movements would undermine religious observance, and that the promise of emancipation would prove illusory. These fears were not entirely irrational. Secularization could indeed weaken Jewish religious life, and modern Europe ultimately produced the most murderous antisemitic regime in history. But a legitimate fear of assimilation did not guarantee sound judgment about the future.
The historical record is more complicated than a simple indictment of prewar rabbinic leadership. Some Orthodox leaders encouraged emigration, some supported rescue efforts, and some risked everything to save Jews. Others were constrained by political realities, British immigration restrictions, poverty, disbelief in the scale of the Nazi threat, or the desperate hope that the catastrophe would somehow pass. Historians have documented the diversity of rabbinic responses, including the extraordinary decisions some rabbis made to save lives even when doing so required setting aside ordinary religious restrictions.
The lesson is not that rabbis as a class failed. It is that rabbinic authority, however revered, does not automatically confer political foresight, strategic wisdom, or the ability to recognize a historical turning point.
Yet the question remains: when the survival of the Jewish people is at stake, what happens when a leader’s ideological commitments prevent him from adapting to reality?
In today’s Israel, this question has acquired an urgency that no serious observer can dismiss. A significant part of Haredi rabbinic leadership continues to resist the integration of young Haredi men into military service, even as Israel confronts persistent security threats and a population of reservists carrying an extraordinary burden. The argument is familiar: Torah study protects the Jewish people, and uninterrupted full-time study must therefore take precedence over military service. Torah study is unquestionably a central pillar of Jewish civilization. But the transformation of that principle into a blanket exemption from the practical obligations of Jewish sovereignty is another matter entirely.
The State of Israel is not a Jewish community living under a foreign government, waiting for a monarch to grant it permission to exist. It is a sovereign Jewish state, responsible for defending millions of Jews. Its soldiers are not an abstraction in a theological argument. They are young men and women who leave their families, careers, and studies to defend the lives of fellow Jews. Some return wounded. Some do not return at all. To insist that one sector’s religious ideal must exempt it from the risks imposed on everyone else is to create a hierarchy of Jewish responsibility that is difficult to reconcile with the biblical demand that Jews stand together when their people are in danger.
The argument becomes even more troubling when rabbinic leaders present military service as an existential threat to Torah itself. Such rhetoric leaves little room for the possibility that a young Haredi man might serve honorably, preserve his religious commitments, and return to a life of serious Torah study. It treats the existing communal arrangement as though it were a permanent, divinely mandated institution rather than a social framework that must answer to changing circumstances. The result is a dangerous inversion: instead of asking how Torah can guide Jewish sovereignty, leaders demand that Jewish sovereignty accommodate their preferred institutional arrangements, regardless of the cost to other Jews.
The numbers make this more than an abstract argument. The Israel Democracy Institute’s 2024 report found that the number of yeshiva and kollel students had grown by 83 percent over the preceding decade, while the number of Haredim enlisting in the IDF had fallen by 36 percent. The same report placed the poverty rate among Haredi children at 47 percent in 2022, after government transfer payments.
These figures do not prove that Torah study causes poverty, nor do they erase the immense contributions made by Haredi families and institutions. They do, however, demand an honest examination of a system that increasingly relies on public support while limiting the educational and occupational options available to many of its young people.
What is the long-term plan? What happens when the next generation must support a growing population, compete in an advanced economy, pay taxes, raise families, and defend the country? Who is preparing Haredi children for the world they will actually inhabit? Who is ensuring that religious conviction and practical competence can coexist? A leadership genuinely concerned with the future would treat these questions as urgent communal responsibilities. Too often, however, raising them is treated as an attack on Torah rather than an attempt to preserve Jewish life.
Here is where the comparison with prewar Europe becomes most uncomfortable. The danger is not that today’s Haredi rabbis are repeating the Holocaust. They are not. The danger is that the same intellectual habit can reappear under radically different circumstances: the conviction that preserving the existing system is more important than adapting to an uncertain future.
Before the war, some leaders could not adequately imagine the destruction that was approaching. Today, some leaders appear unwilling to imagine the consequences of a demographic, educational, economic, and security crisis developing within the Jewish state. One historical setting involved the destruction of Jewish life by an external enemy. The other involves the internal choices of a sovereign society trying to secure its future. These are profoundly different situations. What connects them is the danger of leadership that cannot think beyond the boundaries of its inherited assumptions.
The prewar world also demonstrates why a community cannot afford to confuse institutional survival with Jewish survival. A yeshiva, a rabbinic court, a Hasidic dynasty, or a communal political organization may be immensely valuable. But none is identical to the Jewish people. Institutions exist to serve Jewish life, not to replace it. When preserving an institution becomes the supreme measure of religious success, the people who sustain that institution can become secondary to its continued existence.
This is the fundamental problem with a leadership culture in which questioning the established order is treated as disloyalty. If a rabbi cannot ask whether a system is producing poverty, whether its educational policies prepare children for adulthood, whether its military position is fair to fellow Jews, or whether its political alliances are strengthening or weakening Israel, then what exactly is his leadership for? A religious leader must do more than preserve the answers of yesterday. He must have the courage to ask the questions of tomorrow.
Jewish history offers a powerful alternative. The Rambam, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, did not teach Jews to abandon reason in favor of comforting illusions. He insisted that intellectual discipline, the pursuit of knowledge, and the responsible use of human faculties belonged within a serious religious life. The Torah repeatedly commands the Jewish people to remember the past, but remembrance is not supposed to imprison the future. The Exodus teaches that circumstances can change. The prophets warn that national privilege does not protect a people from the consequences of injustice and complacency. The biblical tradition is filled with leaders who were challenged precisely because the established order had become incapable of confronting reality.
And what of the famous Jewish principle that pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, takes precedence over almost all other commandments? It is difficult to understand how a religious leadership can invoke the sanctity of Torah while treating the defense of Jewish lives as an obligation from which an entire category of young men should ordinarily be exempt. The question is not whether Torah study matters. The question is whether the Torah can be invoked to evade the collective responsibilities created by the very existence of a Jewish state.
The deepest indictment is not directed at the rabbis alone. It concerns the children who will inherit the consequences of their decisions.
A child born today into an Haredi family in Israel will live in a country whose economy, security requirements, and demographic composition will be shaped in substantial part by the future of Haredi society. Research published by the Israel Democracy Institute in February 2026 projects that limited integration in education, employment, and military service could place substantial pressure on Israel’s economic output and national resilience. Its analysis identifies the period between 2030 and 2050 as particularly important for understanding these consequences.
These are not merely numbers in an economist’s report. They represent the lives of real children. Will they receive an education that equips them to support themselves? Will their families have realistic opportunities to escape poverty? Will they be able to choose a profession without being treated as though they have betrayed their religious identity? Will they understand the modern world well enough to navigate it without fear? Will they grow up seeing the IDF as an institution that protects their families, or as an alien force from which their community must remain permanently separated?
A leadership that answers these questions only by insisting that the next generation study more Torah has not answered them at all. Torah can provide moral purpose, intellectual discipline, and spiritual depth. It cannot substitute for every practical skill required to navigate modern life. Nor should it be made responsible for defending policies that restrict opportunity in its name.
There is a further injustice here. Many Haredi parents work extraordinarily hard, struggle to support large families, and sincerely want their children to live meaningful Jewish lives. Many Haredi men already serve in the IDF, work in the economy, volunteer in emergency services, and contribute to the broader society. Many Haredi educators and community members are trying to create alternatives within their own communities. They should not be erased by a sweeping condemnation of their society. The issue is whether the rabbinic establishment will allow these efforts to develop openly, or whether it will continue to punish deviation from a narrow communal model.
If a young man wishes to combine serious Torah study with military service, why should his choice be treated as a threat? If parents want their children to acquire mathematics, English, science, and practical professional skills alongside religious education, why should they have to fight an ideological battle to obtain them? If a family wants its children to remain observant while becoming economically independent, why should the leadership not regard that aspiration as a victory for Jewish continuity?
A confident religious tradition should not fear the competence of its own children.
The most dangerous element in this debate is the confusion of faith with fatalism. Faith demands commitment to Jewish ideals. Fatalism assumes that human beings need not change their behavior because the outcome has already been determined by forces beyond their control. When a communal system resists practical preparation for the future and insists that spiritual merit will somehow resolve the consequences, faith risks becoming an excuse for institutional irresponsibility.
Judaism has never required Jews to choose between prayer and preparation. Noah built an ark. Joseph prepared Egypt for famine. The Jewish people were commanded to organize themselves, establish courts, defend their communities, and provide for the vulnerable. Even the religious traditions that emphasize divine providence recognize the responsibility of human beings to act within the world they inhabit.
The State of Israel makes that responsibility unavoidable. Jewish sovereignty means that Jews can no longer pretend that national defense, economic survival, education, and public welfare belong to somebody else’s domain. The Jewish people now possess political power, and political power brings obligations. To demand the privileges of sovereignty while denying its responsibilities is not an expression of spiritual superiority. It is a contradiction that threatens the solidarity on which Jewish sovereignty depends.
This is where Haredi leadership must make a historic choice. It can continue defending a system whose assumptions were formed under circumstances very different from those of a sovereign Jewish state, or it can help develop a new model of Torah life appropriate to the realities of the twenty-first century. Such a model would protect serious Torah scholarship without making it a universal exemption from civic responsibility. It would provide children with meaningful religious education and the practical knowledge necessary for adult life. It would respect the right of individuals to serve, work, study, and contribute without being branded traitors to their community.
Above all, it would understand that the Jewish future is larger than any single institution, political party, yeshiva, or rabbinic dynasty.
The greatest tragedy of the Jewish past was not simply that Jews were persecuted. It was that Jewish civilization was repeatedly forced to confront dangers that exceeded the capacity of its existing institutions to respond. The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime, and no responsible historical comparison should minimize its uniqueness. But the obligation to learn from Jewish history does not end with commemorating the dead. It requires asking what forms of leadership best protect the living.
The rabbis of prewar Europe operated under circumstances that today’s Israeli rabbis cannot fully imagine. Today’s rabbis, in turn, possess something their predecessors did not: a sovereign Jewish state, a powerful army, an independent economy, and the ability to shape national policy. With those privileges comes a far greater responsibility to consider the long-term consequences of communal decisions.
A rabbi who cannot imagine the future of his own children, who cannot prepare his community for economic and technological change, who cannot recognize the moral claims of Jews serving in the army, and who cannot distinguish the preservation of an institution from the preservation of a people is not exercising the fullest responsibilities of religious leadership. He may possess immense authority within his community, but authority without foresight is a danger to the community itself.
The ultimate question is not whether Haredi Jews should abandon Torah. It is whether Haredi leadership can summon the courage to defend Torah without sacrificing the future of the Jews who study it. The choice is not between faith and modernity, or between the yeshiva and the Jewish state. The choice is between a living tradition capable of adapting to reality and a defensive ideology that mistakes resistance to change for fidelity to God.
Jewish history has given us enough examples of the price paid when leaders fail to recognize a changing world. We owe the dead remembrance, but we owe the living something more demanding: the courage to confront uncomfortable truths before they become irreversible tragedies.
The Jewish future will not be secured by rabbis who merely insist that yesterday’s arrangements must continue forever. It will be secured by leaders who possess the wisdom to preserve what is eternal in Judaism while having the courage to change what must change.
That is the test of leadership. And it is a test that no rabbinic title, no political alliance, and no claim to spiritual authority can excuse anyone from taking.
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