What is wrong with Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy as compared, say, to its American counterpart? A letter I received the other day from Jerusalem tells all you need to know.

The letter was neatly handwritten by a young woman named Sarah whom I had never heard from before. From what she wrote, she was clearly ultra-Orthodox. Her letter came with a self-addressed, unstamped return envelope and began:

“To my dear Jewish brothers and sisters,

“Most unwillingly and with great difficulty, I am writing you these lines. I will never forget this letter as long as I live – its few words conceal many tears, much sorrow, and a family tragedy.”

Sarah proceeded to tell her story. Her mother died eight years ago. Although her father, a Torah scholar who had never held a paying job, tried to take her mother’s place at the head of the family, the responsibility proved too much for him and he “no longer has the strength both to support the family and give all the children the attention and warmth they deserve.”

Sarah, the oldest of her family’s many children, has done her best to help out. Now, however, she is engaged to be married to “a kind-hearted, decent, and God-fearing young man.” Unfortunately, she and her fiance have no means of their own. “The wedding day,” she wrote, “is approaching and we haven’t yet made any preparations or bought anything for our new home.” Nor can they take out a loan, because neither her father nor her husband, a yeshiva student, will be able to pay it back.

Sarah concluded her letter with a plea. “Please,” she wrote, “help us to celebrate our wedding and get over our great heartache. Lend a hand to rebuilding a Jewish home.”

Beneath this were her signature and a bank account number to which I could send a donation.

Heartbreaking, no?

Well, no. Infuriating.

Sarah’s father doesn’t work. Neither does her fiance. They’re too busy being pious Jews. And since everyone else in their community is busy being a pious Jew, too, they have to turn elsewhere for help. To Israelis who do work. To me, for example.

Which is to say that, besides supporting my own family, and paying my share of taxes, I’m supposed to support Sarah’s family, too. And feel sorry for her, on top of it.

But I don’t. The very thought that she spent days laboriously copying out her letter to hundreds of people like myself, whose addresses she must have gotten from a list of contributors to bona fide charities, is maddening. She could have used the time to sell lemonade on the sidewalk.

Of course, it’s possible that it’s all just a scam. It may be that Sarah isn’t even a real person. Someone may have written a fraudulent letter in her name in the hope that a few soft hearts would respond.

But that hardly matters. Such scams can pretend to be real only because the real thing exists, too. In Israel’s roughly half-a-million-strong ultra-Orthodox community, it is taken for granted that pious Jews are owed a living by someone. Not generally speaking, of course, by the recipients of letters like Sarah’s, but rather by the government to which these recipients pay their taxes. In return for its political support, large sums are transferred by the government to this community every year, both in the form of child allowances to maintain its high birth rate and of transfer payments to its religious and educational institutions, which in turn pass them on to those using and belonging to them.

This is not the way it works with ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York – nor, for that matter, in London, Paris, or Antwerp. Among them it is understood that piety is its own reward and that the pious, too, have to go out and work. If they wish their communities to subsidize religious studies and scholarship, such Jews know that the funding has to come from themselves.

And, indeed, in all of these places, ultra-Orthodox Jews work hard and make good livings. It is only in Israel that they are mired in poverty – and only there that they expect the taxpayer to keep them on the dole.

It can be argued, of course, that only Israel is a Jewish state, and that therefore only Israel has the responsibility to help a religious public to maintain and transmit age-old Jewish traditions whose perpetuation is in the common interest.

This may be so. It may be good for Israel to have high-level yeshivas and well-trained rabbis just as it is good for it to have first-rate universities and competent doctors, engineers, and lawyers. Yet publicly supported medical and engineering students eventually graduate and find work. If the tens of thousands of Jews now studying in Israel’s yeshivas cannot do the same, the ultra-Orthodox community should foot the bill for them.

In the end, it would be far better for this community if the rest of the country would stop supporting it: It would live better, have higher self-esteem and morale, and arouse far less anti-religious antagonism than it does now. Many of its own leaders are beginning to realize this – more quickly, perhaps, than the secular politicians who are still loathe to slash government support for ultra-Orthodox institutions for fear of a backlash at the polls. Yet only by drastically slashing such handouts can one force ultra-Orthodox Jews to turn to the labor market and acquire the skills necessary for competing in it.

I wish Sarah well. It’s because I do that I think it’s high time she realized that it’s not my job to pay her way in life.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.