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Sunday, January 4, 2026
UTJ chair compares sanctions on Haredi draft evaders to Nazis’ yellow star, drawing outcry
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"
United Torah Judaism chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf compares proposed sanctions on yeshiva students who evade the draft to the yellow star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust, sparking outcry from both sides of the aisle.
Addressing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during a debate on the coalition’s proposed Haredi draft exemption bill, the senior ultra-Orthodox politician claims without evidence that more secular Israelis evade service than ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers, and insists that “all sanctions should be canceled.”
“I implore the committee: if there are those who study Torah, exempt them from everything. They should not be tied to quotas or targets,” he says. “In what country in the world do they take a rabbi and punish him? Here in Israel, we’ll decide to punish them? A yellow badge, how can we do this?”
Leading politicians in the coalition and opposition condemn the remark.
“My father wore a yellow badge in the Budapest ghetto simply because there was no Jewish army to protect his life. My grandfather wore a yellow badge when he was murdered in a concentration camp,” said Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, calling Goldknopf’s statement “the dream of every antisemite” because he says it simultaneously trivializes the Holocaust and derides the IDF.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also slammed Goldknopf, declaring that there was “no place in our coalition” for such people “who don’t stop harming the people of Israel, IDF fighters and Torah scholars.”
“Our heroic fighters are the ones battling the Nazis of every generation and preventing them from carrying out the Final Solution conceived by the one who devised the yellow badge,” Smotrich posts on X.
Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, who chairs the committee and is the architect of the bill, says he respects yeshiva students and the Haredi world, but says that “this is not a yellow badge. There’s a limit.”
The Times of Israel Community.