From the Liveblog of
Monday, February 9, 2026
Shas spiritual leader: Anyone who arrests ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers should be excommunicated
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
One of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party’s senior spiritual leaders calls on members of the military police to refuse orders rather than arrest yeshiva students who evade the draft, adding that anybody who carries out arrests loses his portion in heaven and is subject to excommunication.
Speaking with Radio Kol Barama, Rabbi Moshe Maya, a member of Shas’s ruling Council of Torah Sages, states that “anyone who despises the scholars has no part in the world to come” and that there is “no greater dishonor of a scholar than arresting him and putting him in prison.”
In the case of someone who so disgraces a scholar by arresting him, Jewish law states that “he should be excommunicated because he has disgraced a scholar,” Maya declares.
Maya advises soldiers ordered to arrest evaders to ask their rabbis to ask if the IDF is “forcing [him] to transgress a Torah command,” adding that if they asked him directly he “would have told him to refuse an order,” even though he is not a decisor of Jewish law and would not give the soldier a binding ruling.
However, at the end of the day, if a soldier is ordered “to violate a Torah prohibition…it is forbidden to listen,” he says.
After a 2024 High Court decision struck down sweeping exemptions from conscription for Haredi men, the military began sending those men draft notices and, more recently, arresting several who did not obey the notices. Military police attempting to arrest draft evaders have at times encountered street demonstrations.
Shas lawmakers have repeatedly visited draft evaders in military prison.
The Times of Israel Community.