The ultra-Orthodox community will hold a massive “million man” prayer rally against conscription at the entrance to Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon, senior Haredi spiritual and political leaders announced on Sunday evening, amid a reported intensification of IDF efforts to crack down on draft evasion in the insular religious community.

Police said they were preparing for major traffic disruptions.

The protest was originally slated to be held on Sunday but was delayed, reportedly due to disagreements between the various ultra-Orthodox factions involved. The rally will bring together representatives from the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael factions, as well as the Sephardic Shas and other groups.

The rally is the initiative of, among others, Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah and one of the senior heads of the non-Hasidic “Lithuanian” branch of Haredi Judaism in Israel.

In a statement on Sunday evening, Shas spokesman Asher Medina announced that following a meeting of the event’s organizing committee, comprised of “eminent Torah sages and Hasidic leaders,” it had been decided that the event would take place at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday. He later told Radio Kol Barama that the demonstration would be a prayer rally.

Last week, Shas gave up its chairmanships of parliamentary committees to protest the lack of a law regulating the conscription of yeshiva students.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was expected to be presented with an updated draft of a bill regulating ultra-Orthodox enlistment on Thursday, although Hebrew media reports indicated that this may be postponed until next week. Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) has said his goal is to have the controversial bill passed into law in December.

On Monday morning, the Hamevaser daily, affiliated with Agudat Yisrael’s Shlomei Emunim subfaction, ran a page-one article calling on “the entire faithful Jewish public, in its tens of thousands” to protest efforts “to locate and arrest yeshiva students liable for military conscription.”

The protest comes as ultra-Orthodox activists........

© The Times of Israel