From the Liveblog of
Monday, March 11, 2024
Complaint filed against chief rabbi over alleged politicization of role
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel files a complaint against Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef with the ombudsman of the Israeli judiciary, calling for his removal from the Great Rabbinical Court of Appeals over his alleged politicization of his judicial role.
In a letter to the ombudsman, former Supreme Court justice Uri Shoham, the watchdog group asserts that the rabbi’s recent comments encouraging draft evasion constituted “a flagrant violation of the rules of ethics for judges.”
On Saturday evening, Yosef warned that ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, Jews will leave Israel en masse if the government ends the exemptions of mandatory military enlistment enjoyed by the community.
“If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” Yosef said during a weekly lecture. “We’ll buy a ticket… We’ll go there.”
“The [biblical] tribe of Levi was exempted from the army,” he noted by way of comparison, referring to the biblical tribe from which the priesthood was drawn in Temple times.
“Rabbi Yosef misused his authority and position as a judge to intervene in a controversial political matter, with the aim of influencing the evasion of ultra-Orthodox conscription during wartime,” and his behavior stands “in blatant violation of the rules of ethics for judges that prohibit political activity and interference in matters of public controversy,” the Movement for Quality Government writes to Shoham.
In addition, because his comments came as the High Court of Justice is debating the legality of a government resolution passed in June 2023 instructing the IDF not to draft Haredi yeshiva students, they constitute “intervention in a pending legal proceeding,” the group says.
“The movement asks the ombudsman for the judges to investigate the complaint urgently. If he finds it justified, it urges him to act to end Rabbi Yosef’s tenure as a judge in the Great Rabbinical Court.”
On November 21, Shoham recommended the potential removal of Yosef from the Great Rabbinical Court after he organized a Rabbinate conference against government reforms intended to break up the Haredi monopoly on kosher certification and conversions to Judaism.
