Shimon Peres seemed no closer to achieving a Labor-led coalition government with the religious parties, and may indeed have suffered a setback from the speech delivered Monday night by Rabbi Eliezer Schach, spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas and Degel HaTorah-parties.
In fact, the venerated Lithuanian-born rabbi, who is in his 90s, refused to talk polities and instead assailed the non-religious, as he addressed some 10,000 followers at the first national convention of Degel HaTorah.
The convention was held at the Yad Eliahu sports stadium in Tel Aviv, where some spectators paid up to $50 scalpers’ prices to attend.
His eagerly anticipated speech in Yiddish and Hebrew, broadcast live on national radio and television, had been expected to indicate whether the small but pivotal haredi parties would continue to back the hard-line Likud or align with the more flexible Labor Party.
The aged rabbi thus disappointed all pundits when he stated baldly at the outset, “I will not talk politics.”
Instead, he delivered a polemic against secular Jews, whom he charged were antagonistic to the religion that preserved the Jewish people. And he attacked the kibbutz movement, a stronghold of Labor support, for flouting Jewish custom.
NOT APPRECIATIVE OF JUDAISM
“Kibbutzim which do not observe Yom Kippur, Shabbat — can they have a link with their father? Can they be called Jews?” the rabbi asked.
While Schach, who controls eight scats in the Knesset, did not enjoin the faithful to avoid a Labor-led coalition, he charged the Labor Party with being insufficiently “appreciative” of Judaism.
No other party was mentioned in the 20-minute speech, delivered in Hebrew with occasional excited lapses into Yiddish.
Laborites had hoped Schach might lean in their direction because of his reputed sympathy for trading land for peace, based on the halachic injunction that saving lives is paramount. The concept of trading land for peace is anathema to Likud.
For all of his pacifism, Schach indulged in some warlike rhetoric.
“We live in a terrible period,” he said. “War has not started now and has not ended now.”
Therefore, he suggested, the Jew must be stronger than all the gentiles, who have the most powerful weapons, “including Russia and America.”
“The people of Israel have passed exile after exile, hardships after hardships, fires and killings. Strong people have tried to annihilate us.
“For 2,000 years we have faced them with empty hands, without arms, but we have won, we exist,” because the Jews did not break their links with their forefathers, the rabbi said.
Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, leader of Degel HaTorah, said the message he got from Schach’s speech was that his movement should support Likud.
He stressed, however, that the rabbi’s criticism was merely cultural and educational, and did not contradict his known objection to holding on to territories.
Labor and Social Affairs Minister Ronni Milo of Likud said he had no doubt that the religious parties would align with Likud. He said Peres was wrong to think he could form a coalition.
Schach was followed on the podium by the former Sephardic chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, who is spiritual mentor of Shas and also a supporter of land-for-peace.
He, too, devoted most of his comments to religion. But in what seemed an indirect response to Schach, Yosef suggested that the many people who deviated from religion should be approached and brought back to it.
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