Self-labeled groups are increasingly segregating themselves into self-contained sectors. Haredim have long done this, many main-stream Orthodox have done it in the past two decades (largely in West Bank and Gaza settlements), and the secular too have begun to dabble in it recently. The sorting-out of disparate neighbors that occurs uneventfully in more spacious countries poses a daunting challenge in congested Israel. Nevertheless, voluntary segmentation physical, social, and cultural is increasingly favored as a way to distance Israelis from each other's exposed nerves. Where the groups interact at work, in the army most contacts are transitory and well mannered. Some are not.

Separate domiciles
Israel has long had haredi and Orthodox neighborhoods. Since the mid-1980s, however, it has been developing entire towns based on these affiliations. In most West Bank settlements (which, however, account for less than half of the settlement population because of their small size), potential residents were screened by committees of founders or settlement movement officials for (among other things) their religiosity as measured in specific ways. In new, all-haredi cities, housing purchasers must affirm in writing that they observe the Sabbath and do not own a TV set. Until recently, this separatism was deemed a need of the Orthodox only. When the secular recently began to create neighborhoods of the opposite sort places where no Orthodox Jew would feel comfortable much of the country was taken by surprise.

This does not make the problem less threatening. No Israeli can avoid regular exposure, if only through the media, to painful social issues that corrode the unity and integrity of the whole when left without proper treatment. Here we refer to them as "pressure sores." At their most acute, they cause substantial harm to the lives of many individuals and enflame countless others. Added together, they could indeed rip the country apart. Israel's salvation is that they have not added together thus far. However, they flare up at various junctures, sometimes predictably, sometimes quite out of the blue. We explore some of these "tinderboxes" below. When one of them approaches its flashpoint, even compulsive kulturkampfers usually know to back off. They, along with the power centers and the rank-and-file, fear the consequences of going too far.

Separate arts and culture
Orthodox society has devised alternatives to, or imitations of, Western cultural mainstays such as fiction for children and youth, rock music, broadcasting, tourism, and leisure amusements. Orthodox-Right media have become more varied and thoroughly professional. For their part, secularists have managed to confine most sporting events to Saturdays-even when Friday or week-day evenings are available thereby excluding the Orthodox.

Separate services and products.
Jerusalem has shopping malls that cater to haredim and others where secular youth hang out. Jerusalem and Bene Beraq have separate business telephone directories: the regular Bezeq affiliated "yellow pages" and a commercial venture that lists Sabbath-observant enterprises only. Orthodox and non-Orthodox vacationers patronize separate water parks and beaches. The first stage in "privatizing" bus lines, launched in early 1998, places heavy emphasis on service to haredi localities, in which at-tempts are being made to ensure sex segregated seating as the community wishes. Growing numbers of Orthodox consumers, including the National Re-ligious, eschew the food inspection apparatus run by State sponsored rabbinates as "not kosher enough" and prefer off-brands, some manufactured by mainstream companies, that carry religious sounding names and the approbation of stricter rabbinical in spection boards.

Separate secondary and higher education
The Orthodox have built an array of standard yeshivot (traditional seminaries), hesder yeshivot (combined army service and devotional study), high-school yeshivot, kollels (for married men), schools for the "newly religious," enhanced religious studies in secondary schools -and parallel settings, very much mutatis mutandis, for girls and women. The number of students receiving support from the Ministry of Religious Affairs budget, at all levels, increased by 25% between 1995 and 1997, to 203,000 in October of the latter year, in-cluding 79,190 aged 5-18. Devotional study as a vocation, strongly ascendant in haredi society and among some of the National-Religious, faces growing resentment in other quarters on account of its funding and the deferral of army service that it confers.

Separate educational worldviews
In 1953, when the general school system was de-ideolo-gized, the Orthodox were allowed to keep their own systems-State-Religious and Inde-pend-ent (haredi). The latter two have built up a four decade lead in developing insular and firmly rooted curricula. Their pre-state counter part, the Labour-Zionist system, was merged with the "general" system; the new State system, by its very generality, had to cleanse its curricula of the Labour-Zionist version of Jewish values. Consequently, contemporary secularism, as lived by the products of these Jewishly sterilized schools, has retained little of the secular but intensely Jewish approach associated with cultural icons like the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934). Instead, it has aligned itself with the non-Jewish West; many of its proponents construe anything overtly Jewish as an Orthodox incursion to be fought.

Haredim Demonstrating in Jerusalem

Separate sociocultural institutions
The schism is clearest in Jerusalem, where physical and financial resources are rigidly earmarked by sector. Under the incumbent Olmert regime (1993- ), nearly all land for construction of public institutions has been awarded to haredi associations. How much of this reflects remedial affirmative action after decades of municipal neglect of this sector cannot be determined. It does, however, reflect the utter impossibility of sharing institutions.

Separate court systems
Rabbinical courts vs. civil courts are not a new issue. The Israeli scene, however, has several features lacking in the Diaspora: (1) Israeli-secular and Diaspora-heterodox forces, failing to make headway in the Knesset, expect the secular state court system to promote their causes, which depending on legislative minutiae and lacunae it some times does. These state secular courts are "Jewish" by majority composition but "Gentile" in the (Israeli) law by which they adjudicate. Orthodox authorities have for decades worked to persuade their flock to boycott the secular system (in civil torts cases). (2) On the other hand, the official rabbinate and state-sponsored rabbinical courts wield exclusive powers, granted them by the Knesset, to adjudicate matters of personal status for all Israeli Jews. Jews' right to marry and divorce, for example, are exercised and restricted under religious laws whose force is not recognized by many Israelis. This monopoly evokes resentment even among those who do not run afoul of religious restrictions; those who do resort to consular marriages or fly to near by Cyprus or more distant destinations for civil ceremonies. Divorce, which cannot be granted without the husband's consent, poses a more serious problem.

Separate leisure
All the Orthodox are far behind the secular in embracing Western leisure patterns. Weekend shopping, in particular, has been an issue of contention between the religious and secular communities.