Rav Shalom Ber Sorotzkin’s statement comparing the arrest of a yeshiva student in Israel to the dark days of Soviet persecution is a perversion of what really happened, and it's time to call him out on his distortion of facts!
He claimed the bochur was imprisoned for one reason only: "because he learned Torah." That is a bald-faced lie!
The arrest was for refusing military service!! But Rav Sorotzkin’s doesn't care about the truth.
From his narrow-minded perspective, every arrest is an attack on holiness. Every government official is a Russian soldier, tearing a young man from his studies.
The persecution of the Soviet persecution was real and the Czar’s cantonist decrees ripped children from their families for twenty-five years of military service, designed to break their faith. That was cruelty with intent. Antisemitism ran deep in every century—and it runs deep still. Jews were targeted for being Jews. That hatred was evil.
The worldview that gave our ancestors strength to resist assimilation also gave us a lens to distinguish between oppression and consequence. Between moral resistance and civic responsibility.
When your worldview becomes total—when “learning Torah” is the only lens through which you interpret reality—you lose the ability to see clearly.
You lose a basic desire to understand how our choices affect others, and how their responses might be more complex than pure hatred.
When every arrest is “for Torah,” there’s no space left for reflection. No room to consider whether young men avoiding the draft might have mixed motives—sacred conviction tangled up with ordinary fear. You lose the ability to imagine that a government enforcing its laws might be doing something other than persecuting the holy.
And when accountability becomes impossible—when every outside criticism is automatically reframed as persecution—we exile ourselves from reality itself.
Rav Sorotzkin’s statement was not just a defense of one bochur, but the sound of a community that can no longer tell the difference between a government and Pharaoh. The Sorotzkins of the world are totally disconnected from the reality on the ground and have lost empathy to the plight of those in uniform protecting the Jewish people!
