Overview
- Organizers have publicly launched the Prison 1000 program this week to pay NIS 1,000 for each full day a haredi or ben Torah is held in military prison after a draft-related arrest.
- Senior Lithuanian haredi leaders and meetings with senior rabbis, including consultations reported with Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, have lent public religious backing to the initiative.
- A committee of named dayanim will decide halachic questions, eligibility and distributions, giving rabbinical courts exclusive authority over claims.
- Written regulations, drafted with legal counsel, limit payments to unexpected, conscientious arrests and exclude cases of deliberate reporting to authorities or planned travel that leads to detention.
- The fund uses a mutual-insurance model where members pay small regular sums—organizers cite up to NIS 1 per day plus a NIS 3 monthly fee—and registration is expanding across yeshivas and kollelim, which could lower per-member costs but leaves the fund's total long-term scale and any state response unclear.