Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the Shas spiritual leader, attacked Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara on Saturday night after she ordered a state funded memorial event for his father, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, postponed until after the 27 October election on electioneering grounds. He said may God finish her, give her a blow, calling her that evil person and that crazy Miara, and warned this will not pass in silence.
The memorial marks 14 Tishrei on the Hebrew calendar as the date of Ovadia Yosef's death, and a law passed last year requires it be commemorated annually with educational activities and ceremonies in state institutions. The Religious Affairs Ministry proposed holding this year's event a week earlier, a compromise Baharav Miara also rejected. No new date has been set.
Opposition leader Yair Golan, no ally of the attorney general in most disputes, broke from Yosef's camp on this one, saying anyone who wishes that God harm the attorney general because she is enforcing the law cannot be a partner in a democratic government. The state has spent NIS 4 million, about 1.3 million dollars, on the memorial over the past two years, a cost that is itself part of why proximity to an election puts it under review.
The dispute sits at the intersection of religious politics and campaign law six weeks before Israelis vote, and Yosef's language did more to draw attention to it than the postponement itself would have. A rabbi wishing harm on the country's chief legal officer over a delayed ceremony is now the story, more than the ceremony or the delay.