Posted on 05/22/23
| News Source: JPost
Agudat Yisrael will receive NIS 250 million in June for its yeshiva students, the Likud Party said Monday. United Torah Judaism’s hassidic faction had threatened to topple the government if its dispute with Likud and the Finance Ministry was not resolved.
The impasse developed last week after Agudat Yisrael demanded approximately NIS 670m. in funding retroactively to cover the costs of its yeshivot and education systems from the beginning of 2023.
The current coalition funding awards yeshivot NIS 1.6 billion to raise the monthly stipend for each student from about NIS 600 to NIS 1,173 from June until the end of 2023. Agudat Yisrael said the agreement had been to raise the stipend retroactively from January.
According to the agreement, the Finance Ministry will give each yeshiva student a one-time grant of about NIS 2,000, the aggregate amount that each student would have enjoyed had the stipend been increased in January. This stipend, which costs approximately NIS 250m., will come from the NIS 1.6b. that was earmarked for the rest of 2023. At the end of the year, UTJ will use what is left over to cover the remaining deficit.
This will allow yeshiva students to receive the stipend increase for all of 2023, but the budget bill does not need to be amended, according to a representative of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. It also serves as a message to other coalition members who are demanding more funding for their ministries: that they can choose to divide up their coalition funds however they like, but they will not receive anything more from the national budget.
Agudat Yisrael decided not to insist on the rest of the funds it had demanded, which were earmarked for elementary schools. The extra funding for these schools will begin in 2024.
The agreement effectively ended the largest threat to the budget’s passage and thus to the government’s existence, as failure to pass the budget by next Monday would automatically dissolve the Knesset and necessitate a new election.
In a letter to Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara after the agreement between Likud and Agudat Yisrael was announced, Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer said the agreement was illegal. Budget decisions cannot be made without a budgetary source, he wrote. The agreement between Likud and Agudat Yisrael to fill budget gaps by using “future leftover funds” did not point to a clear budgetary source and therefore violated the law, he said.