Prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis questioned whether Israeli law must be obeyed and made extreme statements against secular Israelis during a conference in the southern city of Netivot, held as part of a campaign against military enlistment programs created for Haredi men.
The conference targeted IDF tracks designed for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and young men, including programs that offer religious accommodations and separate service frameworks. In Israel, most Jewish citizens are subject to mandatory military service, but ultra-Orthodox enlistment has long been one of the country’s most divisive political and social issues because many Haredi men study in yeshivas instead of serving in the military.
The event was organized by Ezram U’Maginam, a group that campaigns against Haredi enlistment in the IDF, including by assisting ultra-Orthodox men arrested for desertion and by trying to persuade young men not to join the army.
One of the main targets of the conference was “Kodkod,” an elite IDF technology track for Haredi men aged 23 and older who are not eligible for combat service. The army has also opened other Haredi programs, including rear-service tracks, with adaptations intended to allow ultra-Orthodox men to serve while maintaining their way of life. Some frameworks include separate service conditions and, in certain cases, exemptions from wearing military uniforms.
Rabbi Yitzhak Ratzabi, a senior rabbi among Yemenite Haredi communities and a leading halachic authority in that community, said it was not clear that Israeli state law must be obeyed.
“There is always a question of whether the laws of the state have validity,” he said. “But it seems to me that in this situation, when they discriminate against Haredi Judaism, against those who observe Torah and commandments, when they discriminate against them everywhere and in every field, then of course this is nullified and there is nothing to discuss at all. On the contrary, they are stealing what belongs to us and what we deserve.”
Ratzabi also claimed that the State of Israel was founded to fight Judaism. “The state was established by wicked people with the goal of destroying Judaism, uprooting the Torah,” he said. “The Ashkenazim in the past knew these snakes because they lived among them, but the communities from the East did not know them, they were innocent and did not believe Jews were capable of doing such things. Entire communities came here only for them to uproot all Judaism from them. A real Inquisition.”
He ended his remarks with an especially extreme statement against secular Israelis. When the Messiah comes, he said, “if there are still secular people left and we need to stone them, fine. We will do it. That is a commandment. There is no need to be afraid of it.”
Another speaker, Rabbi Haim Feinstein, a prominent Lithuanian Haredi rabbi and one of the heads of the Ateret Shlomo Yeshiva, attacked the IDF’s Haredi service tracks, saying they were not truly Haredi despite the religious accommodations offered by the military.
“Even the Haredi tracks, which are supposedly Haredi, are all lies and deception,” Feinstein said. He claimed that no one who joins those tracks remains religious. “The facts are well known. No one remains there observant of Torah and commandments in these tracks. They also fight them themselves and scatter them afterward. By mistake they brought non-kosher food, by mistake they desecrated Shabbat, and then the mistake becomes certain, the certain becomes intentional, and so they fall lower and lower until no one remains. It is all deception.”
Feinstein said the army’s goal was simply to get Haredi men to sign enlistment papers, regardless of the accommodations promised to them. “The main thing is that you sign,” he said. “With the clothes, with the beard and sidelocks, with the appearance of a Jewish man, the main thing is that you sign. Once he signs there, he falls there, with everything that comes with it. There is no remedy for him.”
He then described the divide between Haredi society and the state in stark terms. “There are two peoples here,” he said. “There is one people that clings to the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Torah, those who observe the Torah and study the Torah. And there is another government that is entirely heresy, entirely uprooting everything holy.”
According to the IDF, there is capacity to recruit thousands more yeshiva students into Haredi tracks, ranging from combat service to rear-service programs such as Kodkod, Ma’alot Tzur and positions in the Military Advocate General’s Corps.
Since its launch in 2023, Kodkod has grown rapidly. As of May, about 1,000 soldiers were serving in the program, around 20% of them still in training. The IDF estimates that by the end of 2026, the number of participants will reach about 1,100 to 1,200, with hundreds of new recruits joining each year.