Shas’s spiritual leader curses the attorney general and warns Temple Mount visitors of agonising death
Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef aimed at Gali Baharav-Miara and at Itamar Ben Gvir on the same day — the clearest sign yet of the Haredi–Kahanist fracture inside Netanyahu’s coalition.
On 30 August, according to the Times of Israel, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef called Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara “evil” and “crazy” and said “may God finish her” — the paper’s rendering of the Hebrew — over her order postponing a state-funded memorial service for his father, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, until after the 27 October election. The same day he attacked National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, saying those who visit the Temple Mount may “die in excruciating agony.” The peg was a handout photograph of Ben Gvir displaying an Israeli flag atop the Temple Mount alongside an Otzma Yehudit MK. Only the headline and dek of these items were retrievable here; the full Hebrew remarks were not.
Assessment: Two attacks in one day, one on the state’s chief legal officer and one on a sitting minister from the same bloc, and only the first is about the election. The Temple Mount rebuke is doctrinal and old — mainstream Haredi rabbinic authority forbids ascending the compound — but its timing, the same weekend Ben Gvir refused Netanyahu’s merger, is what makes it political. The prime minister’s problem is not that his flank is too small; it is that its two components regard each other as illegitimate. Treat the quoted curse cautiously: it reaches us as an English rendering of Hebrew remarks whose full text we have not seen.