Ex-chief rabbi pans Haredi leaders for trusting ‘atheist’ Netanyahu on conscription bill

Former Sephardic Chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who serves as spiritual leader for the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, castigated Haredi lawmakers in a homily on Saturday night for trusting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exempt yeshiva students from the military draft.

Netanyahu has repeatedly delayed passing legislation that would give military enlistment exemptions for yeshiva students after the High Court of Justice ruled last summer that longstanding mass exemptions for Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.

The dispute over the enlistment legislation led Shas to withdraw from the government last month, while its fellow Haredi party, United Torah Judaism, withdrew from both the government and the coalition, apparently becoming part of the opposition.

“A number of years ago, Netanyahu threw the Haredim aside and formed a government with the left,” Yosef declared, although it was unclear what he was referring to. “We must not forget that, and we must not believe him,” he said. “He’s an atheist, he doesn’t believe in anything.”

“You believe him?” He reiterated later on in his sermon. “He’s an atheist. You trust someone like that? Why do you trust him?”

He suggested that the Haredi lawmakers should have ensured that the government passed a draft exemption law as one of its first acts when it was sworn in at the end of 2022, before any annual state budgets were passed, “as was agreed in the coalition agreement.”

He made the remarks during a weekly sermon in Jerusalem, delivered following a week in which hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protesters descended on the Beit Lid military prison, where some seven Haredi men are being held for not heeding conscription notices.

On Thursday, Haredi protesters briefly rushed police barricades in front of the prison, and burned and ripped up draft orders before breaking out in a circle dance, chanting slogans against military service.

The former chief rabbi, whose father and predecessor Ovadia Yosef created the Shas party in 1984, claimed without providing any evidence that the military police were primarily arresting draft dodgers from the Sephardic Haredi community, because “they know the mother is weak, the father is weak.”

Shas is the only party in the Knesset that specifically represents Sephardic Jews, whose families came to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa.

“What is this, Russia?” he asked his attentive audience, referring to the mandatory draft of Jewish men into the Imperial Russian Army in the 1800s.

“When there’s a knock on the door, check who it is — and if it’s them, don’t open the door,” Yosef warned.

During his sermon, Yosef rabbi repeatedly insisted that Torah study must be the ultra-Orthodox community’s supreme value.

“All the loftiness of the Land of Israel is its Torah — if not for Torah, why did we come to the Land of Israel? What are we doing here?” he asked, distinguishing his audience from the “leftists” who founded the state.

Assuring his audience that “this difficult period will pass,” Yosef also returned to sentiments he had previously expressed that the ultra-Orthodox community would leave Israel en masse rather than enlist in the army, and cited other community leaders who have said the same thing.

It is not clear where the community, most of whom have no other citizenship, would go.

Haredi leaders say military service is a threat to their way of life and would keep ultra-Orthodox men from studying Torah.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits, due to the strain on standing and reserve forces amid the ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.

Last summer, the High Court of Justice ruled that longstanding mass exemptions for these yeshiva students were illegal. Since then, the IDF has significantly stepped up its efforts to recruit the eligible Haredi men, sending out 54,000 conscription orders in July alone, leading the ultra-Orthodox community to declare “war” against the conscription push.

Sam Sokol contributed to this report.