Haredi leader to yeshiva students: Don’t go to IDF draft offices or answer summons

Rabbi Dov Lando, a top leader of Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, declares that yeshiva students should “not show up at [IDF] draft offices at all.”

Lando’s order leads the front page of today’s edition of Yated Ne’eman, which is affiliated with the non-Hasidic Degel Hatorah faction of United Torah Judaism, a key coalition partner of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The situation at the moment is that the courts have declared war against the Torah world, and it is they who opened a front and came to change an arrangement that has existed for years, ordering the army to start the process of actually recruiting yeshiva members,” the rabbi writes, referring to the recent High Court ruling.

He adds that “because the army’s hands are bound in iron chains by the judges, and any compliance with the courts’ edicts amounts to surrender in their war on God and his Torah, yeshiva members are therefore instructed to not show up at draft offices at all or answer any summons.”

Lando concludes by saying he’s signing the order “with worry and apprehension.”