UTJ chair Goldknopf resigns from cabinet after lawmakers vote down bill to dissolve Knesset

By Sam Sokol 12 June 2025, 2:41 pm

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Sam 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"

Housing and Construction Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf arrives at a United Torah Judaism party meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, on May 19, 2025. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90)

Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, resigns from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet after lawmakers vote down a bill to dissolve the Knesset.

Goldknopf’s Hasidic Agudat Yisrael faction supported the dissolution and expressed opposition to the compromise that Shas and Degel Hatorah agreed to with Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein, which paved the way for the measure’s defeat.

In a letter to Netanyahu, Goldknopf said that the premier had been warned that if no progress had been made on legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service by early June, “significant steps” would be taken against the coalition.

According to Goldknopf, the understandings on enlistment reached by Shas and Degel Hatorah do not live up to the promises made by Netanyahu in his coalition agreement with UTJ “and therefore I can no longer take part as a member of this government.”

Goldknopf’s move — which comes after a party official told Haaretz on Wednesday that if Degel HaTorah and Shas opposed the dissolution measure, his faction’s ministers will resign — will force UTJ lawmaker Moshe Roth out of the Knesset under the so-called Norwegian Law.

Despite Goldknopf’s resignation, United Torah Judaism remains a member of the coalition.

Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush has yet to announce if he will resign as well. While denied by his spokesman, Hebrew media this week reported that Porush had sought to reverse his party’s decision to support the Knesset dissolution bill.

In March, Goldknopf symbolically resigned from his secondary ministerial position as a minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, citing the government’s lack of progress toward passing the bill his party seeks exempting yeshiva students from military conscription.