Former chief Sephardic rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, on Thursday called Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Yuli Edelstein “wicked” for demanding tough sanctions on yeshiva students who evade military service.

The comments came hours after Yosef reportedly ordered Shas to sharpen its threats to bring down the government if the Haredi draft exemption is not codified.

“His soul is an abomination,” said Yosef, in footage published by Haredi news outlet Kol BaRama from a gathering in Beit Shemesh, which has a large ultra-Orthodox community.

Yosef, who also took aim at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the premier and Edelstein, both members of the Likud party, belong to a “false right wing. Wicked scoundrels.”

Yosef, who has made several controversial statements against Haredi enlistment to the IDF, said of Edelstein: “He was a prisoner of Zion and came to Israel. It’s a shame he came to Israel, he should have stayed there. He’s causing trouble for the yeshiva students.”

Edelstein, whose committee is currently revising a government-backed law that would reportedly sanction Haredi draft evaders, is a former prisoner of Zion, or Soviet refusenik, who spent three years in Siberian labor camps for teaching Hebrew in the 1980s.

Refuseniks were typically jailed by the Soviet Union for Zionist activity, especially fighting for the right to move to Israel. In 2020, when he was still chief rabbi, Yosef said immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union are “religion-hating gentiles.”

Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, who has called for Haredim who avoid the draft to be penalized, wrote on X on Thursday that Yosef crossed a “moral, Jewish,........

© The Times of Israel