Just a day before Rosh Hashanah, the Israel Defense Forces announced today that it will grant amnesty and release dozens of chareidim currently serving sentences in military prisons for avoiding army service.
According to military sources, the amnesty applies to those whose trials have already been completed and whose original release date falls before September 30. Another requirement is that they must have already served at least half of their original sentence.
The IDF Spokesperson later confirmed the report, clarifying in a statement: “Enforcement authorities in the IDF have the authority to order the early release of soldiers serving in confinement or imprisonment ahead of the chag, for several days only, and provided the conditions set by regulation are met. This authority has been exercised uniformly and equally for many years, and the claim that this is a special initiative to release chareidi draft dodgers is baseless.”
In practice, only a small number of those being released early for the Yom Tov belong to the chareidi community. Military officials emphasized that they are included in the general framework, just as with other sectors, in accordance with longstanding IDF regulations that are applied consistently without political involvement.
The announcement comes against the backdrop of a recent wave of arrests at Ben Gurion Airport. Over the weekend, the Military Police confirmed that more than 70 young men had been detained and imprisoned after being classified as “deserters.” Most of those taken into custody were Breslover chassidim attempting to fly to Uman, Ukraine, to spend Rosh Hashanah there.
Earlier in the day, Sephardic posek Rav Boruch Shraga, the head of a beis din in Yerushalayim, issued a strongly worded letter to Shas MKs criticizing their silence in the face of these arrests. In the letter, he cautioned that ignoring the plight of the detained yeshiva students constitutes “a prosecution against the Jewish people” and reflects dangerous inaction in the face of an attack on Torah learners.
He wrote: “While all of Klal Yisroel will gather in the batei knesses on the morning of the Yom Hadin to fulfill the day’s commandment and to hear the shofar, more than a hundred bochurim and avreichim will be sitting behind bars in military prison.”
Rav Shraga warned that failing to protest this reality amounts to inviting divine disfavor: “I will hide My eyes from you; even if you increase your prayers, I will not listen.” He concluded that “there is no greater prosecution in Heaven than to see those who dedicate themselves to Torah learning thrown into prison, forced to endure the Yamim Noraim in such a lowly and defiled place.”
{Matzav.com}
As long as you have anti religious leadership of Israel on the Supreme Court and the IDF there will never be peace. Soldiers are getting killed or wounded because the army elite lefty’s would rather see dead Israeli soldiers than gazan civilians dead. This is their philosophy. Just as the 1973 Yom Kippur war the then golda Meir knew that Egypt was mounting an attack. She wanted to show the European world that we are the victims and thus 500 Jewish soldiers got killed on first days of the war with many being religious settlers.the leadership don’t care about the lives of soldiers as long as they can keep their political power.
Totally agree.