Haredi MK’s son arrested at anti-enlistment protest outside AG’s home
Police have arrested United Torah Judaism MK Meir Porush’s son, Yisrael Porush, at a demonstration held outside Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara in Tel Aviv.
The younger Porush — a member of the Elad city council on behalf of his father’s Shlomei Emunim movement, as well as a former mayor of the Haredi city, and the leader of the Magen u-Moshi’a anti-enlistment group — was protesting against the detention of ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers.
In a video posted on an official Shlomei Emunim WhatsApp group, Porush’s fellow demonstrators can be heard singing a song about God thwarting the designs of Israel’s enemies as the Haredi politician, wearing a prayer shawl, enters a police cruiser.
“I am being arrested for blowing the shofar in the Land of Israel while there are a hundred young men in detention,” he declares.
According to the extremist Jerusalem Faction group, around 100 Haredi draft dodgers were being held in military prison as of last week.
In a statement, Shlomei Emunim calls Yisrael Porush’s arrest “an outrageous violation of the right to protest,” while MK Porush declares that his son’s detention exposed the “hypocrisy” in which those protesting against the government “cannot be arrested because that is democracy.”
“But when people demonstrate against the attorney general, who demands mass arrests with governmental violence [and] the denial of the right to study Torah…that is forbidden, and the demonstrator must be arrested,” MK Porush says, accusing the authorities of practicing “open discrimination” against Haredi Jews and allowing freedom of demonstration “only to those it wants” while denying it when it is “not convenient.”
“Rabbi Porush exposed this hypocrisy tonight. Thanks to him, everyone now knows that the State of Israel is not a nation of law, but a dictatorship hostile to democracy. There are unelected rulers in the legal system against whom it is forbidden to protest,” he adds.
MK Porush quit as Jerusalem affairs minister over the summer when his party left the coalition over its failure to pass legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service. During his time as a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, he was responsible for the operation of a telephone hotline that advised yeshiva students to ignore draft orders and lie to the Israel Defense Forces.
MK Porush’s son Yisroel was arrested after blowing a shofar during a protest against the detention of draft dodgers held outside the attorney general’s home. He leads an anti-conscription group pic.twitter.com/iZa9rLvcE6
— Sam Sokol (@SamuelSokol) September 27, 2025