Yanki Deri, son of Haredi Shas party’s leader, enlists into the IDF at 40
Move is seen as part of a Haredi mobilization during the war, may also reflect the relative openness of the community’s Sephardic contingent
Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
Yanki Deri, a son of Aryeh Deri — the leader of Shas, a Haredi or ultra-Orthodox party — made his way to an Israel Defense Forces base on Wednesday in order to enlist.
The younger Deri is one of about 3,000 men from the Haredi community, whose men are by and large exempted from military service if they take part in full-time yeshiva studies, who volunteered to serve in the IDF since the outbreak of war with Hamas on October 7.
Deri’s enlistment generated interest because some view it as indicative of changing attitudes among Haredim, whose leaders insist on preserving the military exemption despite growing resentment among many secular and religious-Zionist Israelis.
Deri, 40, spoke to the Times of Israel at the IDF Induction Center in Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv.
He did not know where he would be assigned or for how long, he said, though the expectation is that the Haredi conscripts would not serve more than a few months at most. He declined to elaborate, explaining that when it comes to media, “I am now subject to the IDF Spokesperson Unit’s policies.”
“Generally speaking, I enlisted out of a desire to contribute in whatever way I can. Whatever duties assigned to me I will carry out to the best of my ability,” Deri, who has eight siblings, told The Times of Israel.
In 2021, Yanki Deri, who is a member of his father’s Shas party, was appointed head of the World Zionist Organization’s Department for Fundraising and Strengthening Community Relations, a position with a monthly salary of over $10,000. WZO was founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl and comprises multiple Zionist groups, including major representatives of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism. Its Congress meets in Jerusalem every five years to elect delegates and allocate hundreds of millions of dollars for various organizations and projects in Israel and worldwide.
A former yeshiva student who went into private business after his studies, Yanki Deri has three sons and a daughter with his wife Elisheva. The family lives in Jerusalem.
While he was named Ya’akov Menachem Deri, he was given the distinctly Ashkenazi nickname Yanki during his yeshiva studies in New York, where many of his classmates were Ashkenazi.
His involvement in politics is widely seen as an extension of the political career of his father, one of the most influential and controversial politicians in Israel.
Earlier this year, the High Court of Justice overruled the appointment of Aryeh Deri as interior and health minister, calling the appointment “unreasonable” due to his criminal convictions, most recently for tax fraud in 2022. In 1999, Deri was sentenced to four years in prison for bribery, among other offenses.
Deri has maintained that prosecutions against him were politically motivated, designed to end his career and deprive Sephardic Shas voters, many of whom believe their demographic has been silenced and disenfranchised by what they see as a predominantly Ashkenazi elite, of a political voice.
The ruling on Deri gave a tailwind to the so-called reasonableness law, a major piece of legislation in the government’s judicial overhaul plan, which banned the judicial use of the “reasonableness” test. When the law passed, an already divided country saw a wave of intensified protests.
However, that internal strife was put aside in the wake of the devastating assault by Hamas terrorists on October 7, in which the invaders murdered more than 1,400 people in border communities, abducted over 240 people to Gaza and committed atrocities in Israel that have shocked the nation and the world.
Yanki Deri’s enlistment is not a groundbreaking occasion in the Deri household.
Aryeh Deri himself served in the Israel Defense Forces for several months, as have multiple members of his extended family.
This fact reflects the reality of greater openness among many Shas voters to secular society in comparison to the more insular Ashkenazi Haredi circles, particularly the voter base of the United Torah Judaism, the Ashkenazi counterpart and coalition partner of Shas.
Whereas UTJ has made the exemption of its young men from conscription a key political issue, vowing zero compromise, Shas under Deri has called for reaching “broad agreements,” a phrase understood to mean major concessions.
Still, hundreds of Ashkenazi Haredim have also enlisted to the IDF, and thousands more are volunteering in the war effort as civilians.
This week, dozens of yeshiva students from the Karlin-Stolin Hasidic sect joined thousands of other volunteers picking vegetables in the fields and greenhouses of the Western Negev region, where farmers are grappling with a paralyzing shortage of workers due to the departure of thousands of Thai and other foreign laborers from the war zone.
But this is already generating some pushback in Haredi circles where Torah studies are sacrosanct.
This week, Dov Lando, a top leader of Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, introduced a weekday curfew at his Bnei Brak yeshiva, preventing students from volunteering for the war effort and all other activities outside the yeshiva.
On October 22, Lando published a short statement in Yated Ne’eman, a Haredi newspaper, that appeared to call on Haredim to stop volunteering to help the war effort.
“Let the Torah studies and all Haredim know that to serve G-D we have only the study of Torah,” the October 22 op-ed read. “Those who engage in other activities… imagine that they are our salvation from the troubles and dangers that surround us.”
He added: “Abandon the fallacies and ideas and illusions and return to your homes and resume studying and upholding the Torah, repent and pray to the creator of the world so that he may save us from all dangers.”
The Times of Israel Community.