Who they are
Nechumi Yaffe is a scholar of haredi society and a tenured senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s School of Public Policy. She was born in Haifa in 1976 and trained as a teacher at Gateshead Seminary in England. For more than a decade she worked in the Bais Yaakov system, teaching history in Jerusalem seminaries, advising haredi schools, writing textbooks and sitting on the committee that set the national history matriculation exam.
She took master’s degrees at Touro College and at the Hebrew University, where she wrote on the integration of haredim into Israeli society, and a Hebrew University doctorate on poverty and identity among haredim. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton and teaching at Rutgers and Yale’s summer school, she joined Tel Aviv University in 2019. She co-directs the Haredi Research Group at UCLA and is a visiting researcher at Harvard Business School for 2026–2027.
She advised the government on haredi affairs during the Covid-19 pandemic. After 7 October 2023 she founded the haredi civilian emergency network, which mobilised some 100,000 haredi volunteers, and in 2024 received the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation’s knighthood award for it.
Positions and record
Haredi service: Called in October 2024 for military and civilian service routes adapted to Haredi religious life.
Employment: Called in October 2024 for state programmes to close men’s gaps in English and maths and help them enter skilled work.
Childcare: Opposed removing daycare subsidies to press Haredi men to enlist, saying this harms working women and children; argued in October 2024 that enforcement should address the men directly.
Core education: Said in September 2023 that the state must guarantee every child a basic education, including core subjects, even where communities oppose it.
Where they stand
Holds the party line on every issue.