From the Liveblog of
Thursday, June 5, 2025
UTJ rabbis set to discuss ditching coalition as party mouthpieces fume over Haredi draft
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"
The spiritual leadership of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism’s Hasidic Agudat Yisrael faction is slated to convene this evening to discuss supporting moves to bring down the government, a day after fellow UTJ faction Degel HaTorah received instructions from its own rabbis to introduce a bill to dissolve the Knesset.
According to Army Radio, the meeting with take place at 9:30 p.m. at Moshav Ora near Jerusalem. While Agudat Yisrael chairman Yitzchak Goldknopf, who also leads the overall UTJ party, has already been pushing to advance such a bill, no formal decision by the Council of Torah Sages has yet been officially taken.
Both UTJ and Shas are threatening to bring down the government over its failure to pass a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service, though UTJ lacks the numbers to do so alone.
This morning, the Hamevaser daily, affiliated with Agudat Yisrael’s Shlomei Emunim subfaction, slammed a proposed conscription law backed by Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud), arguing that its provisions for financial sanctions on draft dodgers constituted “a series of cruel and draconian sanctions aimed at humiliating Torah students.”
UTJ believes that Edelstein’s revised bill treats yeshiva students as criminals and constitutes “institutionalized and unprecedented persecution,” the paper states, expressing shock that Edelstein, a former “prisoner of Zion” in the Soviet Union, “where Jews were persecuted for learning Torah,” would “act in a similar manner and deny basic rights to Torah scholars.”
Likewise, Degel Hatorah mouthpiece Yated Ne’eman ran a front page article attacking Edelstein’s sanctions as motivated by “evil and dark-hearted malice.”
Headlined “Israel is heading to elections,” the story cites Rabbi Dov Lando, the senior leader of the so-called Lithuanian stream of non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodoxy, as saying that “a government that intends to treat Torah students in this way is a disgrace to the Torah and must be overthrown and elections held.”
It “has no right to exist [and] it is forbidden to be a partner with it,” he adds.
Lando is also the chairman of Degel HaTorah’s ruling Council of Torah Sages.
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