If you happen to be on the mailing list of the US Yated Ne’eman, then this past Thursday you received an email asking you to answer the phone with warmth when a teenage charedi girl calls you in the next few days.
What’s this about? The title of the mailing is “An Unprecedented Grassroots Movement Across 80 Seminaries.” In fact, this is the exact opposite of a grassroots movement, which means an initiative driven from the bottom up by ordinary community members rather than centralized leaders. This is an astroturf movement - that’s the real term for a fake “grassroots” campaign. This is an initiative driven from the top down by charedi Gedolim™ and askanim.
So, what’s this particular astroturf movement about? Money, of course. Due to the Court’s legal barriers to Bibi’s government continuing to transfer billions to support charedi draft-dodgers in their lifestyle, an enormous financial shortfall is developing in the charedi world. They’re not going to rely on Hashem having decided their parnasa on Rosh HaShanah, or davening and trusting in Hashem to help - when it comes to things that you can’t offload to the Zionists, you’ve gotta do your hishtadlus! And since they are not interested in enlisting to help relieve the strain on reservists (six of whom committed suicide in the last two weeks), nor in getting a job and fulfilling Chazal’s mandate to support one’s family, it’s necessary to fundraise even more.
The Gedolim™ have therefore been traveling around the world, fundraising millions from American, Canadian, Mexican, Panamian, and other wealthy Jews who somehow believe that supporting charedi freeloaders (rather than dati kollel networks like Echad l’Echad or Torah MiTziyon) is their ticket to heaven. But even that is far from enough to replace the billions usually received from Israeli taxpayers. So now they’re recruiting 30,000 charedi seminary girls to fundraise for them.
Yated Ne’eman showed photos of Rabbonim getting excited about the recruitment event. But they left out the photo of the actual event itself, which was this:
I presume that the American Yated realized that for American yeshivish readers (as opposed to Israeli charedim), it’s a bit jarring to see rabbonim standing behind a tall curtain when addressing a female audience (which does not happen at American charedi women’s events).
But things are actually even more bizarre.