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Last update - 14:23 03/07/2009
Send the IDF chief rabbi home
By Haaretz Editorial
Tags: israel news

The Chief Military Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, Brig.-Gen. Avichai Rontzki, has managed once again to stretch his scope of authority to breaking point. "In my personal opinion," he said according to statements obtained by Haaretz military correspondent Anshel Pfeffer, "the service of women in the army is not self-evident." This means, in simple Hebrew,
in principle women should not serve in the army.

Rontzki's use of Talmudic logic and the pretensions of naivete as a damage control tactic ("in my personal opinion") are his standard trick when he takes swipes at the values of Israeli society in general and of the IDF in particular. It appears that the chief rabbi, who was not
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aised as an observant Jew, is eager to prove to the most extremist rabbis that his views are up to their standards. Again and again he breaks all the rules of his position.

The Law on Defense Service (1949) clearly states that the entire population, including women, is subject to mandatory conscription. After a bitter struggle between the political leadership and the ultra-Orthodox community and as part of the "religious status quo" agreement reached
between them, a regulation was adopted enabling exemption from military service for women who declare that they lead a religiously observant life. This, however, became a known way to evade army service. Many religious women object to this behavior and insist on enlisting. The
IDF, which has opened many combat positions to women, has allowed religious women to serve together, and in conditions that are convenient to them.

The IDF has tried to explain that the chief rabbi's statements were made at a forum held to discuss issues of Jewish law affecting religiously observant women only, not in a public forum, and that he "shared with participants the fact that during visits to IDF units he had witnessed the difficulties religious women faced in fitting in because of the inability to provide them with service conforming to halacha," but the explanation is worse than Rontzki's actual statements.

There is no difference between men and women when it comes to the difficulty of serving or the difficulty of deciding whether or not to serve. Only someone who has spent time in the shadow of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, who even within the national religious community is considered an
extremist to the point of embarrassment when it comes to issues of men and women, can make such a chauvinistic and patronizing distinction. The conscription of women is not an internal matter for the religious commuity and the IDF is not a branch of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva.
Rontzki, as usual does, rudely trampled the norms of government and the national consensus. His position is also unacceptable to the national religious community, where rabbis such as Yuval Sherlo, head of the hesder yeshiva in Petah Tikva, demand full commitment to the state.

Rontzki's previous statements about the superiority of Jewish law to the IDF's ethical code, the superiority of the religious soldier and more  his obvious scorn for the secular public, and his untolerable, religious-extremist interference in matters of education in the IDF  should have made it clear to the IDF chief of staff that the chief rabbi has been derelict in his duty. Now the chief of staff must finally reach the necessary conclusion and send Rontzki home without delay. It is inconceivable for the army's chief rabbi to transform the unit he heads into the flagship of the unenlightened extremism that is destructive to both the IDF and the country.
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