the difficulty of choosing a date for elections

The parties have spent the past day or two dealing with finding an acceptable date for the next elections, should an agreement not be reached to form a government before the deadline on Wednesday night.

Various dates between the end of February and the end of March were proposed, and many of them had problems. By law elections are to be held on a Tuesday, creating a bit of a difficult time scheduling the elections with limited options. The final date agreed upon for elections will be March 2, 2020 - again, if no government is formed in the coming days.

Some of the potential dates for elections were rightfully shot down - one day was Purim, another was Memorial Day for soldiers whose burial places are unknown. It is legally possible to hold elections on these days, but there is broad agreement not to.

One of the dates proposed was March 17. This date was opposed by UTJ because the Hebrew date of March 17, 21 Adar, is the yahrtzeit of Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk - author of the Noam Elimelech, and many chassidim travel to his grave in Poland on his yahrtzeit, which would handicap UTJ and cause them to possibly lose many votes. I find that humorous, as pretty much every day is the yahrtzeit of someone important - just go daven in a hassidic shteibel on any given day and ask why tachanun is not being said that day. But I guess if someone was important enough to not say tachanun for but not important enough to get a party at his grave it is his own fault, so those days don't matter.

So, it seems the agreed upon date will be a Monday, on March 2, and will require a special vote to allow it to not be held on the Tuesday.

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