Make Your Voices Heard

PEACEFUL PROTEST As the last echoes of their davening faded into the Jerusalem air the intensity gave way to euphoria and the crowd began singing and dancing. “The police were shocked at how peaceful it was. No rock-throwing no name-calling no garbage-burning. They hadn’t believed that we could achieve such a degree of discipline” (Photos: Flash90)

Yossi Deitsch is used to pulling strings to make big things happen. As a leading UTJ politician and protégé of longtime MK Meir Porush the well-connected Slonimer chassid is the type of person who can arrange for thousands of Bais Yaakov girls to arrive at the Kosel precisely in time to offset the monthly media spectacle of the Women of the Wall or to kick-start the quiet but effective job-training programs of the Kemach organization. But when Israel’s Moetzes Gedolei haTorah ordered him to arrange a “million-man march” in less than a week he honestly doubted whether he could pull it off. 

The march was sparked in February of 2014 when a particularly bitter alliance between MKs Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett threatened to criminalize all chareidim who avoid the draft in order to continue learning in yeshivah. Before then a long-standing arrangement provided for yeshivah students to avoid the draft — as long as they met certain protocol — in a grudging truce with the chareidi community. But the Nineteenth Knesset was propelled by a virulent strain of anti-chareidi sentiment and the previous arrangement was at real risk of being overturned. 

“The gedolim couldn’t remain silent” remembers Deitsch who currently serves as deputy mayor of Jerusalem. “They decided to gather a critical mass of Jews to protest the law and the sentiment behind it. Here in Eretz Yisrael — the homeland so many generations of Jews had dreamed of — would a bochur really have to decide between abandoning his Torah learning or being branded a criminal?”