The intersection of religious, community, and market logics in admissions to ultra-religious schools: the case of Haredi Yeshivas

This study explored admission processes to yeshivas – Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) secondary schools for boys – in Israel, drawing on the analytical perspective of institutional logics. The data comprised semi-structured interviews with agents holding key positions in the admission processes, including educators, recruiters employed by yeshivas, and admission advisors working for community charity organisations, municipalities, and school networks. Participants emphasised admission criteria guided by the religious logic, relating to classifying students according to their level of religiosity and excellence in religious studies. However, the findings revealed a decoupling between the religious logic, which serves as a legitimacy façade, and actual admission practices that blend this logic with principles informed by the community and market logics. The community logic reflects informal communal stratification based on the power, wealth, and ethnic origin of the student’s family, alongside practices ensuring all students are placed in yeshivas. The market logic is manifested by intense competition, personal and aggressive marketing, and demands for package deals offering joint placement of excellent and weak students. The dominance of the market logic also emerged discursively, as participants frequently used terms like “market”, “branding”, “transaction”, and “products” to describe the admission process. Through decoupling, actors in the yeshivas’ admission processes mask nonconformity to the religious logic under the guise of compliance. Paradoxically, though the Haredi community invests substantial political power to avoid state supervision, the absence of the state logic appears to facilitate the erosion of the religious logic due to a lack of coordination and uniform guidelines.