In latest flip-flop, key Shas rabbi retracts statement that Haredim who don’t study can serve in IDF

A senior spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party retracts his remarks that suggested young Haredi men who are not enrolled full-time in yeshiva could serve in the IDF under certain conditions.

Speaking with Radio Kol Hai Monday, Rabbi Moshe Maya, a member of Shas’s ruling Council of Torah Sages, had said that “if there is an arrangement whereby someone who enlists would not come to desecrate the Shabbat and would preserve his holiness and purity — why shouldn’t he enlist?”

The statement, coming amid a fierce legislative and societal debate over Haredi enlistment, appeared to be a dramatic reversal of Maya’s previous position.

In June, Maya was one of several senior Shas rabbis who signed an open letter expressing opposition to any enlistment legislation that would lead to the conscription of yeshiva students. In the letter, the rabbis declared that it was forbidden for those not in yeshiva to enlist, even into tracks specifically geared toward ultra-Orthodox soldiers.

However, today his office sends out a statement clarifying that even young ultra-Orthodox men who do not study in yeshiva are forbidden to enlist.

“I am not granting any approval or endorsement for any military track whatsoever; any attempt at dialogue will be carried out only with the consent of all the members of the Council of Torah Sages,” he says in the statement.

“The army in all its frameworks is a melting pot into the secular world, and therefore the position of all the great Torah sages, Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike, including our teacher Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, of blessed and holy memory, is well known: even a young man who observes Torah and mitzvot, but is not in a yeshiva program, is forbidden to enlist. All the more so, we will certainly not send him there,” he adds.