Natan Slifkin's Blog

Below is an English translation of the letter from the bereaved families that has appeared in all major Israeli news outlets (except for the charedi ones, of course), which I received from one of the family members with a request to publicize it. Please pass it around, not merely out of respect to the signatories, but because it is crucial to maximize the public pressure to prevent the Draft Exemption Law from being passed. There is also a link to download it as a PDF file at the end of the post...

It’s been over two years of war, with nearly a thousand soldiers killed, over twenty thousand injured, a new realization that Israel needs a much larger army than previously assumed, a crushing burden on reservists that has destroyed careers and health and families, announcements that reserve duty will permanently go up to a minimum of over two months annually, and still a desperate IDF manpower shortage. Meanwhile, there are 80,000 charedim of draft age who are either learning in yeshiva, worki...

With Thanksgiving on the horizon, there’s a perennial discussion about how we can eat turkey, given the widely accepted view that birds may only be eaten with a tradition, and there is no tradition for turkey. Various answers have been suggested, but it’s important to clarify that there are actually three different questions here:

How did turkey start to be eaten?

How did turkey continue to be eaten, once people realized that there was no tr...

Even those of us who disliked Trump were deeply appreciative when he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. And we’ve certainly been grateful for his standing with Israel against our enemies. People respected him for being able to say things straight and do the right thing even when it was politically unpopular.

And yet now we see Trump giving a warm endorsement to none other than Zohran Mamdani. This is the man who built his entire activist career on attacking Israel, the mayor-elect who just condemn...

The evolution of charedi rabbinic opinions on IDF enlistment is extraordinary. The Chazon Ish sought exemption for a few hundred yeshiva students to rebuild the losses of the Holocaust, but ruled that if there is a military need, yeshiva students must enlist. The charedi rabbinic leaders of the next generation, such as Rav Shach and Rav Shteinman, believed in exempting endless thousands of yeshiva students, but were adamant that every charedi young man who is not learning must enlist, as otherwi...

I want to start this post with an apology. My previous post was about the letter signed by R. Aharon Feldman and others supporting R. Yitzchak Yosef, who is in in the news for his blanket opposition to any IDF enlistment and his nasty attacks on those who call for it. On the spur of the moment (I was writing it while traveling) I titled it “Baltimore Backs Them Up,” which was unfair. There is a sizeable Jewish community in Baltimore and a range of attitudes towards Israel and the IDF; for examp...

Baltimore has traditionally been a Jewish community with a high degree of “Am Yisrael consciousness.” Its flagship yeshiva, Ner Israel, represented the moderate American yeshiva community. Yet an interesting letter just came out of Baltimore. R. Aharon Feldman, rosh yeshivah of Ner Israel, wrote it, and it was co-signed by the more zealous of the charedi rabbinic leadership of the US. But first, some background:

The IDF has a desperate need for at least 15,000 soldiers, most of whom need to be co...

Finally, we can take a break from charedim and army and get back to my planned posts! But first, some announcements about my presentations next week in Lawrence, Teaneck, Monsey and Brooklyn:

And now back to our regular scheduled programming!

With my obsession for the intersection of Judaism and the animal kingdom, I’m fascinated by anything which connects them in any way. So, for example, I have very special bags for my tallis and tefillin, which are made from a giraffe pelt. Naturally I was intr...

Makor Rishon, Israel’s leading national-religious newspaper, just published an extroardinary interview with the editor of the Israel edition of Yated Ne’man. You can read the original article in Hebrew at this link, and you can download an English translation (lightly edited from ChatGPT) with a few interspersed comments by myself below. I have to warn you, you might find what he has to say profoundly depressing. But I think that it’s great that they publicized the worldview of the charedi leade...

I almost was not going to write another post about the charedi army refusal this week, because I am just so sick of it all and it feels like flogging a dead horse. But the insanity is so broad and multilayered, I feel an obligation.

Where to begin?

There’s the editor of Israel’s Yated Ne’eman, the representative of Daas Torah, who claims that the IDF tanks and planes only operate thanks to the tens of thousands of charedim in yeshiva. Of course, it begs the question of how Israel won in 1948 and 1...