Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, has come under fire for calling on Health and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel (Shas) to provide budgets only to municipalities which have a synagogue or yeshiva.
In a video published by Kan News this morning (Sunday) from Rabbi Yosef's weekly Saturday night lecture, the Chief Rabbi tells Minister Arbel, who replaced Shas chairman Aryeh Deri after the Supreme Court disqualified him from serving as a minister using the court's "unreasonable" justification, that "you have power in your hands, use that power. It is a privilege. Continue to do good deeds."
Rabbi Yosef instructed Arbel: "Give the councils budgets – on the condition that they build a synagogue or yeshiva." He added: "Don’t tell them explicitly, because it’s illegal, do it wisely."
Former Labor MK Ram Shefa responded: "Wow. 20 distilled seconds of corruption, coercion and everything which is wrong with the politics of this coalition. Every liberal should explode at this."
Labor MK Gilad Kariv wrote on Twitter: "May you have the help of God doing illegal things. This is the face of the Chief Rabbinate. How shameful. How embarrassing."
Yisrael Beytenu chairman MK Avigdor Liberman demanded that Rabbi Yosef be dismissed as Chief Rabbi.
"It's time to stop the madness that is the theft of the public treasury through deals made by the haredi businessmen in the Knesset and in the official state institutions," Liberman said. "Separation between religion and state is the order of the hour."
The Movement for Quality Government submitted a complaint over Rabbi Yosef's words to the commissioner for complaints against judges, accusing him of a "blatant violation" of the ethics of judges and of "weakening public faith in the decisions of the rabbinical court and the authority of its judges to conduct just trial without being politically swayed."