With just over a week to go until the Israeli elections, Degel HaTorah leader Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch delivered a fiery address warning of the danger if the left comes to power.

“If, chas v’shalom, these leftists get power, they would change the whole face of Eretz Yisrael, the complete opposite of the Torah,” the Rosh Yeshiva warned.

“It’s not only the issue of the army. It’s also Chinuch Atzmai, the chadarim, Bais Yaakov,” the Rosh Yeshiva said. “Every single place where they can interfere with us, to pull us away from our way of life, they do it.”

The only answer, he said, is numbers at the ballot box: “And the only way we have to stand against them and defeat them, in the natural way, is only with large numbers on our side.”

Rav Hirsch, the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivas Slabodka in Bnei Brak and a co-chairman of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, is one of the senior leaders of the Litvish Charedi world.

His remarks come as the Charedi parties make the military draft the centerpiece of their campaigns ahead of the October 27 elections. United Torah Judaism, which brings together Degel HaTorah and Agudas Yisrael, has pledged not to serve in the next coalition unless a law regulating the status of yeshiva bochurim is passed, and Shas has taken the same position.