What do they want from the Avreichim, that they should die from hunger?

So says the cover of this weeks Mishpacha's magazine where the cover story interviews the head of the largest Gemach in the world (who has seen a tremendous increase in the number of people taking loans), and details the financial crisis that the Israeli Charedi community is going through.

98% are requesting loans just to continue living. I know for sure of hundreds of girls who are sitting at home because there is no money to marry them off . People come to us because they need expensive treatments. What should I tell them? That they should forgo surgery until the government will fall? What do they want from the Avreichim - that they should die of hunger?

R' Kuperman then goes on to blame the financial crisis in the Charedi world on the government which has cut funding and the Charedi rich who don't give enough tzedaka.

What he fails to say is that the Charedi world itself is to blame for setting up a society that cannot sustain itself. When you set up a system where every man is supposed to sit and learn in kollel forever, you are setting the society up for a financial collapse.

Of course people can't marry off their daughters when the price for such a marriage is an apartment plus support for the husband to keep learning. Where on earth is the money going to come from when the father of the girl has himself been sitting in kollel for 20 years?

Of course people can't pay for expensive surgery because they have no supplementary health insurance because they can't afford the few shekels a month for such insurance.

Of course people have to take out loan after loan to pay their monthly bills, when the husband is sitting and learning (earning almost nothing) and the wife is earning next to nothing because she wasn't allowed to get a university degree.

A while back I posted a quote from R' Shteinman that people should not buy life insurance as the merit of giving tzedaka to the widows and orphans is what is saving this generation from destruction. The practical result of this policy is that every single day I get a flyer in my mailbox telling of some tragic death and that because of it the wife and children have no food to eat.

Someone in the Israeli Charedi world (not Jonathan Rosenblum) needs to state the obvious truth, that the current system is financially bankrupt and cannot go on. Much of the Charedi world is living in a fantasy world that the government is going to fall and the Charedim will be in the next government and restore the government money. It isn't going to happen. No Israeli government in the foreseeable future is going to give significant amounts of money to the Charedim. The Charedi world is going to have to wake up and understand that it has to become self supporting, and not self supporting with a handful of super rich paying the bills and the rest sitting and learning, but self supporting where the majority of the population goes out and works and only the true elite sit and learn long term.