Renegade Shas rabbi to establish new party that supports Charedi conscription

 

A prominent Sephardic rabbi from the southern city of Netivot is planning on establishing a new ultra-Orthodox party to compete with Shas on a national level, after successfully challenging its dominance locally, Israeli television reported Sunday.

According to Channel 13 news, Rabbi Haim Yosef Abergel’s new party will be named “Mayim Chaim” (Living Waters), and will support the introduction of secular studies into the ultra-Orthodox school curriculum as well as military service for Haredim.

Abergel is the son of the late Rabbi Yoram Abergel, a popular rabbi who himself split with Shas in 2015. In 2013, the senior Abergel was arrested on suspicion of extortion in connection with threats against a mayoral candidate in Netivot, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

The younger Abergel’s public split from Shas began last year when he removed his Bnei Yosef school network from Shas’s Maayan HaChinuch HaTorani school network, transferring it to the state-Haredi education track, and beginning the process of introducing the state-mandated core curriculum.

This led to intense backlash from Shas, which ran letters in the party newspaper claiming that the newly-independent schools’ “broken and corrupt education” would cause “the children of Israel to transgress their religion,” Haaretz reported at the time.

In a video message shared online in February, Abergel encouraged Haredim who are not learning full-time to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces.

“The entire Jewish people are one family [and] it is impossible to ignore the needs of the Jewish people,” he said. “It is impossible to denigrate, God forbid, those holy warriors who gave their lives for the sanctification of God’s name.”

“A person who goes out to earn a living, instead of working in a pizzeria or a butcher shop or a garage, let him go in the army,” Abergel added, asserting that there are service tracks in the military which are compatible with maintaining a Haredi lifestyle.

Abergel’s rhetoric differs starkly from that of the senior rabbinic leadership in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. Rabbi Moshe Maya, a senior member of the Shas Council of Torah Sages, last year told Kol Baramah Radio that it was “forbidden [even] for those who don’t study [full-time] to go to the army” because they would “end up violating the Shabbat.”

While government ministers belonging to Shas have expressed similar views to those of Abergel regarding the conscription of Haredim who do not learn full-time, the party has disavowed their statements.

The army has stated that it currently needs some 12,000 new soldiers to meet manpower needs in the ongoing war, 7,000 of whom would be combat troops.

Currently, approximately 80,000 Haredi men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for military service and have not enlisted. The IDF sent out 18,915 initial draft orders to members of the Haredi community in several waves since July 2024, but, as of late April, only 232 of those who received orders have enlisted — 57 of them in combat roles.

According to a 2024 study by the Israel Democracy Institute, as of last summer at least 22 percent of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students under the age of 26 were employed, in violation of the terms of their since-invalidated exemption from military service.

Until recently, ultra-Orthodox men of military age were able to avoid conscription by enrolling in yeshivas for Torah study and obtaining repeated one-year service deferrals until they reached the age of military exemption. However, this ended last June when the High Court of Justice ruled that there was no legal basis for their decades-long exemption.

The ruling has prompted increasingly vocal demands for the passage of legislation that would reinstate these privileges, potentially destabilizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition in the process.

A spokesman for Shas, chairman Aryeh Deri, did not respond to a request for comment.