Rabbi Eliezer Schach, the aged Ashkenazic sage, has issued a blistering attack on the fervently Orthodox Sephardic Shas party for remaining in the Labor-led government coalition.
The 95-year-old Schach asserted that Shas had “removed itself from the community of the haredim,” or fervently Orthodox, and was causing “the ruination of religion.”
Schach’s diatribe was circulated to all the Israeli media and prominently published here Thursday.
Schach, spiritual leader of the small Degel HaTorah party, opposes Shas’ participation in the current government, citing, among other factors, the fact that the avowedly secular Meretz party is another member of the coalition.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, has called on his followers to resist responding to Schach’s attack.
Schach refused this week to acknowledge that the recent removal of Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni as minister of education — at Shas’ insistence — was an achievement for the Sephardic party.
Indeed, at a conference of the Agudat Yisrael party in Netanya, Schach asserted that the Cabinet reshuffle had made matters worse from the haredi perspective.
Division also exists within the Ashkenazic camp.
The Agudat Yisrael gathering, involving haredi leaders from Israel and abroad, ended in disappointment when it became clear that Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael are not yet prepared to set aside their differences and reunite.
The two parties coexist within the United Torah Judaism Front as a single Knesset faction, but they retain their separate identities — Degel having split off from Agudah in the 1980s.
Tensions mounted at the conference when Degel representatives took affront when the Agudah newspaper Hamodia did not refer to Schach as “maran,” a term used in haredi parlance to designate the greatest rabbis.
Agudah’s rabbinical leaders are the Hasidic rebbes of Gur and Vishnitz. While these two rabbis have thus far gone along with Schach in rejecting Labor’s overtures to enter the coalition, they have not joined with the Lithuanian sage Schach in his ferocious attacks on Shas.
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