Police say they have opened a probe after former chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said a man asked him for a halachic approval to kill Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
Religious Affairs Ministry director general Yehuda Avidan contacted police after Rabbi Yosef reported to him that someone had approached him with a request to issue a Din Rodef against Baharav-Miara — a Jewish religious decree issued against grave offenders, which gives people an okay to stop them even if this requires killing them.
Avidan, in a letter to Police Commissioner Daniel Levy cited by Hebrew media, cautions that Yosef’s office “warned about a threat that seems concrete and could endanger the attorney general’s life.”
Police say their Jerusalem District has opened the probe after finding a letter near a home in the city containing an “explicit threat to harm a public official.”
Baharav-Miara has clashed repeatedly with the current government and infuriated ultra-Orthodox leaders by ending subsidized daycare funding for families of draft dodgers, requiring the military to send thousands of enlistment orders to yeshiva students, and pushing for the arrests of those who don’t comply.
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