JERUSALEM—When Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, granted a few hundred haredi Orthodox Jews an exemption from army service, it's likely he never dreamed that 63 years later, tens of thousands of haredi Israelis would claim the exemption—or...

The cascade of condemnations started pouring in almost as soon as the Israeli TV report aired. Its subject was  an 8-year-old girl harassed by Haredi men on the way to her Modern Orthodox girls' school in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh. The Israeli...