Shas, the Sephardic Orthodox Israeli political party founded by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is experiencing what looks increasingly like an internal power struggle. The rebels represent something that most people didn’t even know existed: the party’s progressive wing. Shas was launched in 1984 by Yosef and his protégé, Aryeh Deri. The platform included strict Orthodoxy coupled…
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the rising proportion of ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews in the Israeli population, and the various challenges it poses to Israeli society. Most dramatic are the declining proportion of 18-year-olds who will be available for military service, since the great majority of Haredi men claim an exemption as full-time…
Maariv’s ace reporter Ben Kaspit reports in an article (Hebrew only) posted on the paper’s Web site Thursday morning that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual mentor of the Shas party, has endorsed a freeze on new Israeli construction in East Jerusalem in order to maintain good relations with the United States. According to Kaspit, Yosef…
Tuesday was Mimouna, the annual festival of the Moroccan Jewish community, and there were lively parties across Israel. But while the Moroccan community tends to come out in force for Mimouna, it seems that as a whole it is losing connection with its traditions. A new poll published by Maariv reported that only 51% of…
Here in Israel, they say that Passover brings Jews together. Religious and non-religious, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Tel Avivians and Jerusalemites, the vast majority of Israel’s Jews will sit down to a Seder this evening. Yet few people realize that Passover also spurs a certain unity between some of Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The holiday…
When Israel’s Interior Ministry announced approval of plans for 1,600 new homes for Orthodox Jews in East Jerusalem on Monday, March 8, embarrassing the visiting Vice President Joe Biden, Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Sephardic Orthodox Shas party found himself in the hot seat. After toughing it out for two days while the heat…
Bibi Netanyahu is due in Washington next week to address the annual AIPAC Policy Conference. Nahum Barnea of Yediot Ahronot, the lead political commentator at Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper and widely considered the dean of Israeli journalism, has some advice for him. If you’re relying on the Jewish right as your main base of support in…
A former Chief Sephardic Rabbi and current spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas religious political party, Rav Ovadia Yosef, in his weekly sermon last Saturday night called women who wear prayer shawls to daven at the Western Wall “stupid” and “deviants.” He was speaking of Women of the Wall, a group of devoted and, dare I…
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