Degel HaTorah faction of UTJ announces it will resign from government today over conscription issue

By Sam Sokol 14 July 2025, 9:17 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. 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"

Degel HaTorah MK Moshe Gafni leads a Finance Committee meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, on May 8, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/ Flash90/ File)

Lawmakers from the Degel HaTorah faction of United Torah Judaism’s will resign from the government today over the Haredi conscription issue, a spokesman for the faction’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Dov Lando, announces.

“In accordance with [the rabbi’s] instructions, Degel Hatorah Knesset members will leave the government and coalition today,” the statement reads.

The statement is accompanied by a copy of a letter the rabbi wrote on Sunday evening calling on his faction’s MKs to quit the coalition.

Accusing the government of seeking “to increase the hardship of the lives of Torah students” and repeatedly “failing to fulfill their obligations to regulate the legal status of the dear yeshiva students,” Lando states in the letter that his view is that “participation in the government and the coalition should be immediately terminated, including immediate resignation from all positions.”

The letter is also signed by Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, the dean of Bnei Brak’s Slabodka yeshiva, another member of Degel HaTorah’s ruling Council of Torah Sages.

The party’s other faction, Agudat Yisrael, has previously said it is in concert with Degel HaTorah, but it has not yet commented on Degel HaTorah’s announcement.

UTJ as a whole has not made any formal announcement on the matter, either.

The party does not hold enough seats in the Knesset to bring down Netanyahu’s government without fellow ultra-Orthodox party Shas following its lead.

While Shas has threatened to do so, it has not yet announced any decisions on the matter.

Even if the two parties quit, they have said they are uninterested in toppling the coalition at this juncture. The upcoming three-month Knesset recess, which starts on July 27, would give Netanyahu time to try to come to an agreement with the Haredim.

Earlier, UTJ threatened to bolt the coalition if Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein failed to present the bill by the end of the day, with MK Moshe Roth of the party’s Agudat Yisrael faction saying that the Likud lawmaker had until the end of the day to comply with its demands.

Speaking with Channel 13, a party source says Netanyahu has 48 hours to deal with the issue “or it’s over.”