Lapid, Liberman slam UTJ leader for comparing Haredi conscription to Nazi activity

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid and Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman slam senior ultra-Orthodox political and religious leaders for comparing advocates of Haredi conscription to the Nazis, accusing them of dishonoring the Torah.

Addressing reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting, Lapid slams United Torah Judaism chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf, who yesterday accused those in favor of sanctions against draft evaders of supporting a “yellow star” for Torah scholars — as well as prominent yeshiva dean Rabbi Menachem Zvi Berlin, who declared at a gathering in honor of two draft evaders released from military prison that advocates of Haredi enlistment were “no better than Hitler.”

“Hitler killed a million and a half Jewish children, and [Berlin] stood there and compared him to the Israel Defense Forces and no one stood up and said, ‘Sir, Jews don’t talk like that,'” complains Lapid.

“My father had a yellow badge. A 13-year-old Jewish boy who lived in the Budapest ghetto and the Nazis wanted to kill him. My grandfather was murdered in the cold and snow in the concentration camp. Thin as a skeleton. He was in Auschwitz, survived, was transferred to Mauthausen and was murdered there. When he died, he had a yellow badge on him,” he continues.

“How dare you? How dare you compare the Israel Defense Forces to the Nazis? If there were no IDF, we would all be dead like my grandfather long ago,” Lapid asserts, asking “what kind of Judaism” the rabbis are espousing.

“Since when do Jews talk to each other like this? Someday you will have to understand: We are not trying to fight you, we are trying to live with you. We just cannot continue like this while our children die and yours do not.”

Liberman, during his own party’s faction meeting, also slams Goldknopf, calling his statement a “desecration of God’s name” and of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

“I call on the Haredi public to establish a party that will truly represent them and I very much hope that in the next elections we will see a modern Haredi party that will strive to be an integral part of Israeli society,” he says.

Liberman also harshly criticizes Degel HaTorah spiritual leader Rabbi Dov Lando, who during last night’s event in honor of the draft evaders said that those enforcing the conscription of Haredi men into the military are fighting against God and Torah and that the Haredim find themselves “in exile among Jews.”

Asked about Lando’s comments, Liberman tells The Times of Israel that unlike Haredim in Israel, “Jews in the exile [Diaspora] all work and pay income tax.”