Right-wing rabbi blasts MK for taking on IDF over women’s service
Yeshiva head Tzvi Tau denounces lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich for telling yeshiva students to defer enlistment in protest of army’s purported ‘radical feminist’ agenda
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The call by one far-right lawmaker for religious seminary students to delay their military service in order to pressure the army to increase separation between men and women has drawn sharp criticism from one leading seminary head.
Rabbi Tzvi Tau, head of Jerusalem’s Har Hamor yeshiva and a leading figure in the nationalist-religious community, spoke out against MK Bezalel Smotrich’s call for rabbis and teachers to delay their students’ enlistment into the army to protest what Smotrich labeled the “radical feminist” agenda of the IDF.
In a class at his seminary on Sunday, Tau told students, “We are not going to lose our faith in the IDF,” Channel 2 news reported.
Smotrich, writing in the religious weekly B’Sheva, suggested last week that religious students due to enlist continue their studies for a few months past the date set by the army.
Smotrich was apparently incensed by moves within the army to put women in combat roles and increase the number of mixed-gender units.
Although Tau is opposed to mixed-gender units and has criticized the IDF in the past for changes made to the roles of women in the military, he harshly criticized Smotrich, without mentioning the MK by name. The rabbi told his students that while it was forbidden to join an institution that was bad, the army was good.
“The IDF is excellent,” he said. “Not like a certain politician said, who opened his mouth and said we should stop enlisting.”
Tau said that he was concerned that Smotrich’s threats against the army would backfire on the religious-nationalist community.
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“I’m afraid that provocateurs will come and say things like that, which will cause further ruin,” he said. “It will only add fuel to the fire and weaken the Jewish people, the State of Israel and the IDF.”
After publishing his article last week, Smotrich was roundly condemned by lawmakers from across the political spectrum, including by the head of his own party, Education Minister Naftali Bennett.
“No group has the right to ‘teach the IDF’ how to behave and certainly not to refuse the draft,” Bennett said, according to Channel 10 news.
The Times of Israel Community.