Zionist Rabbis' Letter Adds Fuel to Levenstein Fire

Jerusalem, 16 March, 2017 (TPS) -- A group of leading religious Zionist rabbis and educators said Thursday that Orthodox women should not volunteer for combat roles in IDF units that require male and female soldiers to perform “physical roles in close contact.”

The letter, published in Hebrew on the religious Zionist Srugim website, stresses the halactic (Jewish law) and moral duty to serve the State of Israel via military or civilian national service. It clarifies that men and women are permitted to work together, as long as they are not expected to live in co-ed living conditions and provided the opportunity to comply with Orthodox values.

The statement, signed by an A-list of rabbinic personalities, byyeshiva and seminary deans, settlement rabbis including Efrat Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi David Stav, the founder of Tzohar organization, singles out co-ed combat units including Karkal and Arayot Hayarden as particularly problematic.

The  letter comes on the heels of an ongoing controversy surrounding a series of comments by Rabbi Yigal Levenstein, founder and dean of the Bnei David pre-army academy in Eli, disparaging women who serve in the military. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and others have called on Levenstein to resign or face funding cuts to the program.

The Bnei David program is a flagship of the national religious community.

Defending the letter, the rabbis cited reports from Bahad 1, a large IDF training center near Beer Sheva, that said the army forces male and female soldiers to live together, thus violating the rights of observant soldiers to live according to their beliefs.

“The IDF does not have to express my ideology. But cannot express an opposing ideology,” Rabbi Chaim Navon wrote on Facebook Thursday. “The IDF has one, and only one job: To defend the State of Israel. The army does not need to take a stance on controversial social issues. In recent years the IDF has been held hostage of foreign ideologies that view the mixing of men and women in any setting as a supreme goal, without regard for questions about whether or not the mix helps or hinders the army’s ability to [defend the State of Israel].

“I do not think there is any sort of anti-religious cabal amongst the IDF general staff, and I don’t think the generals knowingly took this stance. Without one Orthodox general on the general staff, and in light of the fact that there are virtually no observant soldiers in the IDF Manpower Directorate or IDF Spokesman’s Unit… they do not see this issue as controversial. They are wrong… The letter we published yesterdayay is an expression of near despair. The most moderate rabbis [in Israel] – rabbis who encourage their students to serve in the army – said for the first time that there is a unit in the IDF that their students may not serve in,” Navon wrote.