@MTAB
Yes, the point that you made statements about 1700 in Eastern Europe and have absolutely no facts to bact it up is what I addressed.
To be perfectly honest, I pay no taxes to the Israeli government and therefore have no opinion on how they spent their revenue. That is for the Israeli voters to decide by electing MKs who support what the voters want.
Rav Miller may have been a brilliant man, but he visited Lithuania in the 1930s, that’s 203+ years after 1700.
I don’t know what my ancestors were doing in 1700, but I do have full records from 1812 on in Suwalki Province (Poland/Lithuania/Russian Empire) and in the Shtetl of Sapotzske in what is now Belarus. The males worked in the horse, cattle and leather tanning business. They worked full time from Bar Mitzvah age on. They were typical observant poor Jews who did not have the luxury of learning all day, they worked dawn to dusk scratching out a living. It was only after arrival in NY in the 1860s and early 1870s that time for regular learning at night after work came about. No one learned full time until after WWI, when my father’s youngest uncle learned for 2 years after graduating public High School in Brownsville.
As for my Yekke side, they were city people who arrived in NY in the 1860s. In Germany they had attended Gymnasium and medical school. Life in Big city Germany was far different from an Eastern European shtetl.