A leading Ashkenazi rabbi joined earlier calls by Sephardi rabbis for yeshiva students not to “show up at [military] draft offices at all.”
In a front-page article in the Yated Ne’eman daily — which is affiliated with the non-Hasidic Degel Hatorah faction of the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party, a key coalition partner of Netanyahu — Rabbi Dov Lando charged that the Israeli judicial system had “declared war against the Torah world.”
“It is they who opened a front and came to change an arrangement that has existed for years, ordering the army to start the process of actually recruiting yeshiva members,” the rabbi wrote, referring to a recent landmark High Court ruling that ordered the government to immediately start drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced earlier this week that the military would begin the process of drafting ultra-Orthodox men starting next month, in accordance with the late June court ruling.
Encouraging Haredi yeshiva students not to report for IDF duty, Lando added: “Since the army’s hands are bound in iron chains by the judges, and any compliance with the courts’ edicts amounts to surrender in their war on God and his Torah, yeshiva members are therefore instructed to not show up at draft offices at all or answer any summons.”
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called on the government to denounce Lando’s call, contrasting its near-silence on the matter to the outrage voiced by Netanyahu and his partners against “insubordination” when hundreds of elite reservists stopped volunteering for service last year in protest of the government’s plans to overhaul the judicial system. READ MORE
