The belief that there is a divine commandment for men to serve in the IDF has been one of the central points of disagreement separating religious Zionists from their more insular Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, brethren for at least half a century.
But as the number of IDF soldiers killed or wounded in action continues to rise, and as the religious Zionist community continues to pay a disproportionately high price in casualties, that disagreement has transformed into enmity.
“I am married to IDF Captain Avi, who serves in the Nahal brigade,” wrote Rachel Goldberg in a letter addressed to MKs in anticipation of Haredi-backed legislation seeking to enshrine in law military exemption from compulsory military service for yeshiva men.
“He has done over 220 days of reserve duty in the last year. In the past 10 days he fought in a village in Lebanon and I did not have an opportunity to talk to him. As a nurse, I serve diverse populations, including Haredim,” Rachel wrote. “I don’t understand how it is possible to support a law that exempts large groups from military service. Where is the morality? Where is the sense of shared obligation? Why do we as a family need to sacrifice so much for the state at a significant risk?”
Avi Goldberg was an educator and a rabbi of a religious high school who received ordination from the chief rabbinate of Israel. On October 26, after his wife wrote the letter, he was killed in Lebanon.
Three days later, Rachel, now his widow, read from the text she had written in an anguished television interview.
As of October 30, 777 IDF soldiers have been killed and 5,196 wounded in Israel’s multifront war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
A disproportionately high percentage of religious Zionist soldiers are represented in combat units. That fact, combined with their high motivation on the battlefield, has resulted in inordinately high numbers of religious Zionist soldiers who have been killed or wounded in action.
Channel 12’s political commentator Amit Segal, himself a religious Zionist, estimated on air last week that over 60% of the IDF soldiers killed in October were religious Zionists.
“There isn’t a religious Zionist school, a neighborhood, a yeshiva, without a soldier who fell or who was injured,” said Segal.
On Wednesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi again stressed that the military needs to be larger, as reserve soldiers — who have served multiple stints over the past year in Gaza, on the northern border, and now in southern Lebanon — have been expressing frustration that ultra-Orthodox men are largely not being drafted.
“To all the reservists, I understand the costs, family, employment and the burden. Now we need solutions… The IDF needs to be larger, both in the standing army and reserves, which is why we’re building up more forces,” Halevi said to officers during a visit to the northern border.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 men, women and children, and seizing 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
In Israel, all able-bodied men and women over 18 are obligated by law to perform military service. However, the argument over Haredi draft dodging has focused almost exclusively on males.
Haredim and religious Zionists are committed to the same Jewish legal texts, cite and hallow the same Talmudic scholars, and share the same theology regarding creation, historicism and the authority of halacha, or Jewish law, both in theory and in practice.
Yet a deepening rift separates Haredim and religious Zionists when it comes to military service — and it is having an impact on politics.
On Monday, United Torah Judaism chairman Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf backed down from an ultimatum that his party would bolt the coalition and derail the passing of the 2025 budget unless the government passed a law cementing Haredi military exemption prior to the budget vote.
If in the past, politicians supported by religious Zionists had the freedom to appease Haredi politicians with draft exemptions for Haredi yeshiva students for the sake of maintaining a right-wing coalition that advances other agendas important to religious Zionists, their electorate is rebelling .
Grassroots political activism, emotional pleas and halachic arguments are being mustered in and out of the Knesset to block Haredi attempts to maintain blanket exemptions from military service for yeshiva students.
A number of leading religious Zionist rabbis have made public declarations based on their understanding of Jewish law saying there is no justification for excusing yeshiva students from helping with the war effort.
“All MKs from all the parties who see themselves as religious Zionists should know that legislation providing sweeping exemptions from military service for Torah scholars is a betrayal of religious Zionist values,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shilat, head and co-founder of Birkat Moshe Hesder Yeshiva in Maale Adumim, recently wrote in a letter addressed to students, alumni and parents.
“There is absolutely no halachic or moral justification for exempting part of the nation from military service and participation in a mandatory war of rescuing Israel from its enemies. In a mandatory war, everyone is obligated to participate, even a bridegroom under the wedding canopy,” he wrote.
A bereaved father speaks out
Meanwhile, Rabbi Dr. Tamir Granot, head of Tel Aviv’s Yeshivat Orot Shaul, taped a video message directed at the Haredi yeshiva world on October 27, ahead of the new semester of yeshiva learning which officially begins November 3.
The date also happens to be the anniversary of the death of his son Amitai Tzvi, who was killed by a Hezbollah missile.
In the 14-minute video, Granot pointed to Goldberg as a model for “true Judaism.”
Marshaling halachic sources, Granot claimed that in the present situation of dire danger to the Jewish people, there is no justification for exempting able-bodied men from military service, even if they are engaged in Torah study.
To back up his argument he quoted the late Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, also known as the Chazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus, who was the intellectual founder of non-Hasidic Haredi culture and thought in modern Israel.
“I fear that your Torah will not promote life, rather death,” Granot said in an emotional appeal. “This is not Torah. If this situation continues, God forbid, and on one side there is dying and on the other there is living, on one side falling and collapsing and women not eating or sleeping, and on the other side everything is normal, it will be callous and cruel.”
One of the largest grassroots groups pushing to block legislation exempting Haredim from military service is made up of over 2,000 religious Zionist women and is called Shutafot La’Sherut (Partners in Service).
Its members define themselves as “mothers and wives of Torah scholars who demand a fair partnership in the national effort.”
Members of Shutafot La’Sherut met Wednesday in the Knesset with MKs in an attempt to prevent the passage of legislation allowing military exemptions.
Other private initiatives have sprung up across the nation.
“Here in Efrat we’ve held around 10 demonstrations outside [MK Ohad Tal of the Religious Zionist Party’s] house in the last few weeks,” resident Benayahu Orbach told The Times of Israel.
The demonstrations are aimed at pressuring Tal to oppose legislation exempting Haredim from military service, said Orbach.
by Mati Wagner
