rejection 499
and wariness of visitors and tourists who might disturb this enclave in
the modern commercial city – particularly on the Sabbath, when the
whole neighbourhood, summoned by sirens to cease work from the
appointed time, devotes itself to prayer, Torah study and rest.^2
Meah Shearim was formed in 1875 by pious Jews from the Old City
in search of more salubrious living conditions, but the creation of such
ultra- orthodox enclaves has been replicated during the second half of the
twentieth century elsewhere in Israel (in places like Bnei Brak, near Tel
Aviv) and in the diaspora (in neighbourhoods like Stamford Hill in Lon-
don, parts of Brooklyn in New York, and areas of Toronto, Antwerp and
other cities). In all these places, physical segregation is intended to enable
the ultra- orthodox to raise barriers against the influence of television,
newspapers, advertising and the rest of popular culture, educating their
children in separate schools in which understanding the nature of Torah
observance takes priority over everything, and only the most basic skills
such as learning to read and write are considered necessary additional
accomplishments. Use of the internet has proved a tricky case: it is prev-
alent among some of the ultra- orthodox, but in a massive rally in 2012 in
a baseball stadium in Queens, New York, its general use was condemned.
In these communities, which coexist alongside a western society
which is at a high level of sophistication and (they would say) deca-
dence, families maintain solidarity by arranging their marriages, and
providing employment and financial help, within the community, so
that the outside world does not need to impinge on everyday life. The
birth of numerous children is stimulated by observation of the biblical
command to be fruitful and multiply, enhanced for some haredim by the
doctrine that an increased haredi population is an appropriate response
to the enormity of the Holocaust in which so many of the great centres
of Torah learning were destroyed in eastern Europe.^ The survival of
large families (often with ten or more offspring) owes a great deal to
advances in medical care and the provision of social services by west-
ernized states (including Israel). The high rate of retention of these
children within their communities owes as much to the attractiveness of
the lifestyle and the power of ideologies preached as it does to the
undoubted barriers faced by haredim who seek to venture out of their
enclaves into the unfamiliar modern world. Even haredi women, whose
severely limited schooling has been characterized as ‘education for
ignorance’,^ and whose premium on modesty ensures near- invisibility in
haredi public life to the extent that public photographs of women are
frowned on and women dancing at weddings are screened off from