Religious Minorities’ Perceptions of Official COVID-19 Health Guidelines: The Case of Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel

Journal of Religion and Health https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01662-x ORIGINAL PAPER Religious Minorities’ Perceptions of Official COVID‑19 Health Guidelines: The Case of Ultra‑Orthodox Society in Israel Sima Zalcberg Block1 · Sara Zalcberg2,3,4 Accepted: 1 September 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract This article focuses on perceptions of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox population in Israel—a religious minority—regarding guidelines enacted by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) during the country’s second wave of COVID-19, and ways the community coped with the pandemic. Semi-structured interviews with 30 ultraOrthodox individuals revealed five major discourses reflecting participants’ perceptions. Three discourses objected to MOH guidelines, while the other two aligned with them. The study’s findings also indicate a lack of cooperation between the ultra-Orthodox population and state health authorities, emphasizing the need to implement culturally adapted health interventions. Study limitations are discussed, and future research recommendations are provided. Keywords COVID-19 · Health behaviors · Religious minorities · Ultra-Orthodox Introduction The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) population is a minority group in Israeli society and the Jewish world. In Israel, the Haredi community is composed of 1,226,000 people, constituting 12.5% of the country’s population. The community is characterized by * Sima Zalcberg Block Sara Zalcberg 1 School of Social Work, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel 2 Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel 3 Religion Studies Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel 4 Shandong-Tel Aviv Joint Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Religion and Health a particularly high fertility rate (6.9 children per woman), a young population (60% under the age of 20), and low socioeconomic status (Malach & Cahaner, 2021). The Haredi population is classified into three major streams: (1) Hasidim, whose society is organized around a Hasidic “court” that is led by a rebbe, who shapes the nature of his congregation; (2) Lithuanian, characterized by a relative openness to modern life as compared to the Hasidim; and (3) Sephardim, a stream comprised of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East who have adopted the Lithuanian lifestyle (Brown, 2017). While the Haredi population is divided into many subgroups, they all share numerous attributes: adherence to the strictest interpretation of Jewish law; commitment of males to Torah study, with emphasis on the importance of communal gathering for study and prayer; obedience to religious authority (rabbis); strict modesty norms regarding women’s clothing; objection to or reservations about a pre-messianic State of Israel; isolation from majority society by concentrating in enclaves, in certain cities and neighborhoods, due to the perception that the external world is threatening the community’s existence. These attributes create an inherent tension between the Haredi community and the surrounding majority population (Friedman, 1991). Despite this, the boundaries between the Haredi community and majority society do allow some flexibly and may adjust under certain circumstances such as some police operations, even as religious constraints may pose obstacles for advancing community cooperation with such state organizations (Yogev, 2021). The literature distinguishes between the mainstream moderate camp of Haredi society in Israel—the majority—and the minority extremist camp, affiliated with the Eda haHaredit. The Eda haHaredit is the framework that unites the groups and circles that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish State. This camp adopted a hard-line anti-Zionist stance and demanded that its members isolate themselves totally from the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel (Friedman, 1991; Keren-Kratz, 2016). Typically, the mainstream camp follows the state’s laws and avoids clashes with state authorities, while the extremist camp tends to break state laws, often in contentious and violent ways. The Israeli outbreak of COVID-19, beginning in March 2020, effected the Haredi communities in ways similar to other worldwide religious communities and congregations (Shapiro et al., 2020). The COVID-19 crisis led governments worldwide to implement guidelines that altered the nature of person-to-person interactions, which had profound implications for gatherings within religious settings and organizations (Osei-Tutu et al., 2021). Since religious gatherings can attract large numbers of participants and contribute to the spread of viruses, religious congregations and institutions were closed in many countries (DeFranza et al., 2020). The Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) demanded the same from religious congregations and institutions in Israel, including those in the Haredi community: where it ordered the closure of educational institutions, including yeshivas (Jewish educational institutions for religious studies), and greatly restricted the number of worshipers in synagogues (Schroeder et al., 2021; Shapiro et al., 2020). On March 25 2020, the government declared a lockdown which added more restrictions and legal sanctions to the previous guidelines (Waitzberg et al., 2020). 13 Journal of Religion and Health These steps aroused opposition within many circles of Israel’s Haredi community, leading them to violate the guidelines intentionally. As a result, the rate of infection among the Haredi population was three times higher than the non-Haredi rate: 37% of all Israeli patients in 2020 were Haredim—from a population which is only 12.5% of the total (Malach & Cahaner, 2021). Similarly, until mid-October 2020, the death rates among the Haredi community were four times higher than their share of the general population (Weinreb, 2021). Despite this, when a second lockdown was declared in Israel in September 2020 during the second wave of COVID-19 (July 2020–February 2021), violations of health guidelines by the Haredim intensified and were followed by contentious protests and violence against law enforcement officers. This reality led the authors to examine perceptions of the Haredim of the MOH guidelines and how the community coped with the pandemic during its second wave—a period of time during which vaccines did not yet exist, and it was not clear if and when they would. As every religious minority group has unique beliefs, practices, and norms that can affect its members’ health and health behaviors, it is important to understand how the dynamic during COVID-19 varied among different religious minorities (Shapiro et al., 2020). While many studies have been published about the conduct of various religious minorities during COVID-19 (e.g., DeFranza et al., 2020; Michaels et al., 2022; Osei-Tutu et al., 2021; Weinberger-Litman et al., 2020 (...truncated)