Rejecting petitions, High Court says Chief Rabbi Yosef can receive Israel Prize
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
The High Court of Justice rejects petitions requesting that it order Education Minister Yoav Kisch not to award the Israel Prize to Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef in the field of Torah literature, petitions that cited controversial comments he has made regarding ultra-Orthodox enlistment to the IDF.
Yosef threatened in March that if ultra-Orthodox men were to be legally required to enlist in the army, the Haredi community would leave Israel, generating outrage from civil society groups and politicians, including from the coalition.
The Israel Democracy Guard organization filed a petition to the High Court arguing that Yosef’s comments, made during wartime, “disparaged and discriminated against the sector of the public that bears the burden of the state’s security,” and contending that Yosef’s warning was “a blatant violation of the obligation of loyalty to the state to which he is committed by virtue of his position.”
Writing for the majority, High Court Justice Isaac Amit says that the accumulated corpus of jurisprudence regarding the Israel Prize demonstrates there is no legal reason to intervene in the decision of the education minister to adopt the recommendation of the Israel Prize judges panel.
Amit writes that “Yosef’s outrageous and inappropriate statements throughout the years of his term in office should be viewed with great severity, precisely due to his being a public servant and a spiritual-halachic authority for a large public.”
But he concludes that Yosef’s comments are not connected to the professional field for which he was awarded the prize, and adds that due to “the near-immunity of the prize committee’s recommendation from intervention,” there is no room for the court to overturn the decision.
Justices Ruth Ronnen and Khaled Kabub both concur, with Kabub adding that in light of this ruling and numerous others, the time has come “to say in a clear voice: There is no room for petitions attacking the decision of the education minister to award the Israel Prize to any candidate, however ugly and disparaging his comments might be.”
