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It sounds almost like a scenario from the end of days: One recent Thursday night before the election, a group from an Arab-Jewish, socialist, political action organization made forays into several central Jerusalem neighborhoods to hang posters expressing their solidarity with a population group that is more often an object of hostile attacks.
Printed in Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic, no less, the posters were meant to convey the message to the capital’s sizable ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) population that, basically, “We’re all in this together”: “Not one of us want our grandmothers to be stuck lying in the hospital corridor. … None of us want to be forsaken in old age. … All of us want a good education for our children,” the posters read.
“We had spoken among ourselves about how we were fed up with the incitement against the Haredim in the election campaigning – something that is in fact quite common on the left,” explains Carmel Givon, a 19-year-old activist with the organization Standing Together (“Omdim Beyahad”). And so the group of some 15 young people decided to reach out with the posters, which, with their stark black-and-white text, look from a distance like the pashkevilim that plaster walls and message boards of many Orthodox neighborhoods.
Givon, who has been involved with a variety of left-wing groups since age 16, says the group decided to follow up that goodwill gesture with a more substantial political struggle on behalf of the Haredi community. Consulting with people from within the community, the members of Standing Together’s Jerusalem branch – it calls them “circles” – learned about the wide gaps between the salaries paid to ultra-Orthodox teachers and teachers working in secular state schools, and stationed themselves around the city to hand out flyers about the problem.
“The salary of a Haredi teacher can range from 25 to 50 percent less than that of a secular teacher,” Givon says. “And they generally are hired as contract [freelance] employees, so that 80 percent are fired at end of the school year and then rehired in the fall,” denying them the social benefits permanent employees receive. “We wanted to raise awareness of the problem among the secular public. And we hoped for a joint battle.”
So far, although...