Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Sunday slammed ultra-Orthodox leader, rabbi Meir Mazuz for calling senior ministers, including Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, traitors and worse than the Nazis.
Mazuz who is a member of the Shas party leadership, made his claims in a televised Torah lesson on Saturday night.
"The Nazis killed by grandfather in a concentration camp and tried to kill my father in a gheto," Lapid said. "My only answer to Mazuz is that I love all of the people of Israel and wish them a happy Jerusalem Day, a day of unity and love of country," Lapid said.
Mazuz is considered an important religious authority among Shas voters and Sephardi Jews and stands at the head of a religious institution that enjoys government funding.
To his audience he said he hoped Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman, "along with all their friends and their friends' friends, depart this world."
Mazuz said the government was stifling the Haredi public. "They are suffocating religious students in order to give more to the Arabs."
He also said the ministers are "traitors to their people, haters of their people and worse than the Nazis," adding that the Nazis loved their own people while Israel's leaders hate Israelis and want to "destroy women children and old people as well as religious learning institutions who have preserved the existence of the Jewish people over thousands of years."