including the police in our prayers for our soldiers..

Minister of Internal Security Gilad Erdan has requested that the Chief Rabbis of Israel officially change the text of the prayer for the welfare of the soldiers of the IDF and that it should explicitly include the police and border patrol forces. The official text currently says "the soldiers of the IDF and the security forces", but Erdan says that today the front line of defense against terror and other danger is more often the police and the "Magav" forces so they should be explicitly included i the prayer.

Interestingly, just nearly a year ago the rav of the police forces proposed a similar change and Chief Rabbi Dovid Lau gave his blessings to it. I dont know why it needs to be requested again, but perhaps it was not then widely adopted or officially changed.

I looked in my Koren siddur and it says "soldier of the IDF and the security forces". My Artscroll siddur doesn't have the prayer at all, though if I remember correctly the RCA edition of the Artscroll siddur does, though I dont have it to check the text.

To be a bit "Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev", how wonderful is it that a secular minister in a secular government of a largely secular state is concerned that the police should be included in the people's prayers.. this did not (I do not know why not) come from a religious/Haredi minister or member of government or from a rabbi at any level but from a secular minister.... one can criticize and point to this or that speech and say they left God out of the picture and it is clearly belief in our own powers, or one can see that even if they do not always say it, they still seem to believe it...

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