Last week, a Shomrim investigation published in Mako magazine revealed the growing scale of the mental health exemption industry from the IDF within the ultra-Orthodox community. While public discourse on "sharing the burden" has largely focused on the recently canceled “Torato Umanuto” (Torah is His Profession) exemption, along with the calls from ultra-Orthodox parties to legally enshrine draft avoidance or find workarounds if that fails, an underlying trend has emerged. Currently, between 15% and 20% of ultra-Orthodox young men avoid military service on mental health grounds—three times the rate compared to the general population—with rabbis, intermediaries, and psychiatrists sometimes working together to circumvent the military system.

“I was sent to someone who taught me how to act when meeting with the professionals who determine whether you have a mental disability,” says Ephraim, who grew up in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, was exempted from military service due to mental health issues and later had that exemption nullified. He is now an officer in the IDF. “In retrospect, I know that the way they told me to move, to talk and to dress was an attempt to imitate schizophrenia. He told me, for example, to take an old hat and to crumple it up, with my suit, to muss up my hair and my sidelocks, to smear peanut snacks on myself and to slur my speech.

The “they” that Ephraim is referring to is one of the key figures in the falsified exemption industry: the fixer, known in Yiddish as a macher, who helps the family of the young candidate for military service obtain an exemption. Shomrim has received evidence that, since the High Court ruling annulling Torato Umanuto exemptions, demand for the services of these machers has skyrocketed. Shomrim has also obtained recordings of two conversations between relatives of draft-age ultra-Orthodox boys and machers involved in the industry. In one of them, the macher is from the Hasidic ultra-Orthodox community, while the other is from the Haredi-Sephardi community. These conversations shed light on how the fake mental-health exemption industry works in practice.

In a conversation with the concerned mother of one ultra-Orthodox youth, for example, the macher explains the current situation vis-à-vis legal exemptions. “Right now,” he says, “because of all the issues with the law, more people are getting a mental-health exemption. The army looks into it as it always does, but nothing beyond that, and if we do it well, with good intentions, there should not be any problems,” he adds. How does it work? “First of all,” he explains, “we get the documents. We go to the doctor and show him what we have. There are also doctors in on it who will cooperate. The doctor writes a letter, it’s sent to the enlistment office. They have to take it into account, and with God’s help, they will issue an exemption”.When the mother raises concerns during the conversation, saying that her son does not actually suffer from any mental health issues and asking about the legality of the plan, the macher is quick to reassure her. “Some parents have concerns,” he tells her, “but the moment you get deep into the process, all these concerns disappear – because you realize and see that it’s not frightening and it is not complicated. It’s not a problem that the boy’s mental health is perfectly fine. Everyone is fine. Coordinate with me in advance. You’ll come to Jerusalem one night. We have people coming in every night and we’ll explain it all to you.”

Another macher whose conversation with the parents of an ultra-Orthodox candidate for military service has been obtained by Shomrim went into even greater detail. “We do not simply invent a backstory for people,” he explained. “We talk to the boy and find a personal story that has been with him since he was a child or a youth. Everybody has experienced some kind of trauma in life, whether it was during the coronavirus pandemic, at the Meron tragedy, during the past year’s war, a teacher or classmate who abused him. Children experience things in life and do not always tell their parents. That’s true for everybody.”

The macher goes on to explain that “maybe if you try to ‘let him go’ and think about some trauma he went through in life or some illness; alternatively, about an encounter with the police. We could even use a traffic citation. There are some things the army just isn’t interested in. We have to submit the documents, amplify the story and get the boy connected to that story.”

How, then, does the macher amplify the story? In this conversation, he provides a detailed breakdown of the plan of action: “If the boy was in Meron when the tragedy happened, for example, we will sit him down with someone with expertise to analyze the story with him and then he will have an appointment with a psychiatrist, accompanied by one of his parents, a friend or someone else who will talk about the anxiety he’s suffering, how he does not sleep well at night and that he sees all kinds of things. And then the boy will say that he has visions of  Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, spirits or whatever he connects to. And then the psychiatrist writes a medical opinion that he needs treatment and gives him a prescription for some kind of medicine. You take the prescription to the pharmacy and get the pills – just so that you can say you’ve got one and can take it to the IDF’s mental health officer. Sometimes, they will ask for more documents or another prescription – and we’ll take care of that.”

When the parents say that they are worried that the army will catch onto the ruse, the macher replied that the plan is totally safe. “They don’t catch them. Maybe a decade ago there was one case when the parents didn’t do it properly, but, since then, we’ve had 10 years without problems,” he said, with the additional reassurance that he is “a member of several organizations in Israel that are involved in this.”

According to the macher, these organizations have accumulated such expertise and are so well-oiled that they even take into account the identity of the mental-health officer who will be on duty at the recruitment center on any given day. “Based on your place of residence, we can tell you what day to go to the recruitment center,” he told one family member. “When there is a more sympathetic officer.”

 Regarding the identity of the psychiatrists, he said he was aware that the military monitored the activities of psychiatrists who cooperated with them: “When there are psychiatrists who, let’s say, ‘do the job’ when we send people to them—the military knows because they have a blacklist of psychiatrists, and those who do the job well sometimes end up on that list. That’s why sometimes the HMO psychiatrist is actually better; it depends on the case.”

“During this time, there’s an increase,” the macher says about demand for his services. He insists, however, that this does not affect the service he provides. “It’s true that in all of the ultra-Orthodox streams, thousands of boys are doing it. So, obviously there has been an increase in the number of people asking for mental-health exemptions but thank God, there are plenty to go around. There are enough disorders for everybody.”