Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers rail against IDF after jailed draft dodger prevented from donning tefillin

Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers harshly criticize the military after an IDF spokesperson confirms reports that draft dodger Avraham Ben Dayan was not allowed to put on tefillin while held in military prison.

In a statement, the IDF said that Ben Dayan had indeed been prevented from wearing tefillin — small leather boxes containing Torah verses, which Orthodox Jewish men don every weekday morning during prayers — due to a delay in his transfer to a detention unit. The spokesperson added that it was contrary to regulations and that “procedures in the prison have been sharpened” to prevent a recurrence.

In response, Agudat Yisrael MK Meir Porush declares that the spokesperson’s statement is indicative of an “unacceptable systemic failure.”

“It is illogical that, on the one hand, the legal system, in its madness, obsessively demands the arrest of yeshiva students, and, on the other hand, allows the most basic Jewish rights to be violated,” he declares. “The time has come, long ago, to stop arresting Torah students. This is not how a country governed by Jews operates.”

Degel HaTorah chairman Moshe Gafni accuses the IDF of arresting “a young rabbi in Ofakim for the crime of studying Torah” and adding “a sin to a crime and not letting him don tefillin all day long, as if we were in the Roman Empire.”

“If anyone thinks we will move past this in silence, they are mistaken. We will not remain silent about this. Those who study Torah will continue to study Torah,” he declares.

Shas MK Yoav Ben-Zur questions how people are being prevented from putting on tefillin “in the state that rose from the ashes of the terrible destruction after the Holocaust, a state that was established with the vision of protecting the Jewish people and the tradition.”