“The simple answer is that people outside of Israel don’t live this conflict and don’t experience the tension that there is in Israel, like over the issue of military service,” says Yisrael Schwebel, a member of the Litvak Hasidic community who was recently elected to the board of the JNF, having served for five years as head of the Department for Periphery Advancement and Diaspora Involvement at the World Zionist Organization. For example, in June 2022, a Haredi newspaper called The Voice of Education slammed representatives of Eretz Hakodesh for obtaining funding from the JNF for Haredi youths, citing concerns that “hundreds of thousands of Haredi youths across the country will be exposed to the Zionist poison and coercion that the JNF disseminates.” The late Rabbi Deutsch, one of the leaders of the Jerusalem Faction, wrote an article in 2022 in which he came out against Haredi participation in the national institutions. This dichotomy came to a head in advance of the recent elections for the national institutions, when, in February of this year, Rabbi Dov Lando, the leader of the Litvak community and the most vocal opponent of ultra-Orthodox service in the IDF, published an article in Degel Hatorah’s newspaper – Yated Ne’eman – in which he called on the Haredi to withdraw from the national institutions, citing Chilul Hashem– desecrating the name of God.
Author: Editor
Published at: 2025-12-28 23:00:00
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