After order to delete video, Shas assails elections committee chief’s ‘persecution’

Shas slams Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg, who ordered the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party to take down a campaign video featuring an IDF serviceman following a complaint by Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party.

“It is not surprising that Judge Sohlberg rushed to comply with the left-wing party led by Eisenkot and disqualified a Shas video that contains no IDF symbols or elements. The left constantly spreads propaganda against Shas on the draft issue, but when Shas presents the truth, they immediately intervene,” the party says in a statement.

“The legal persecution against the right, traditionalists, and the religiously observant is no longer surprising. You can delete a video, but you cannot delete the hundreds of thousands of families who support Shas.”

Sohlberg, who is himself religious, issued an interim order to remove the video and gave Shas two days to respond to Yashar’s petition, which alleged that the video, among other issues, constituted a violation of the prohibition against using the IDF in election propaganda.

In an apparent bid to hold onto moderate voters turned off by its hardline stance against IDF conscription, Shas last night launched its election campaign with a video featuring a family waiting for their son to arrive home from the army for Shabbat dinner. As the young soldier runs in, he is hugged by his father and brother, a full-time yeshiva student, and a message runs on the screen stating that “more than 30,000 conscripts and career soldiers voted for Shas in the last election.”

The latter figure is untrue. It is based on the counting of “double envelopes” containing the votes of those who didn’t vote near their home, including soldiers, which are usually counted after the rest of the votes nationwide have been counted. However, the double envelopes also contain the votes of other security forces, prisoners and detainees, hospital patients and workers, diplomats and envoys abroad, and people with disabilities who voted at accessible ballot stations.

The ad appeared to stand in stark contrast to Shas’s actions in recent years, with the party at the forefront of efforts to enshrine legislation that would grant ultra-Orthodox men an almost complete exemption from military service .