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Nov 12, 2008

How important is Bet Shemesh?

We in Bet Shemesh think we are living in an important city. It is a large city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. the real estate has been hot. According to the former mayor Danny Vaknin he had been the head of various forums of mayors, and director of various organizations involved in goverance.

I always thought that while we were living in a quiet rural town, it had acheived some level of importance.

Last night I learned that we are all fooling ourselves. I was listenign to the news, checking various websites, and while all the talk was elections, bet Shemesh never even got mentioned. Theyw ere talking about incumbent mayors fighting for re-election, they were talking about incumbents being replaced. they were going through the various regions of Israel talking about the avrious cities and updating what was happening. And no mention of Bet Shemesh.

With a mayor so well connected, with 15 years of incumbency, with a city so "important", I would have thought there would be an election update from bet Shemesh...

I guess Bet Shemesh is really pretty insignificant overall. It is important to us because it is our home, but nationally, we are still small potatoes, and our (former) mayor must not be as influential and important as he claimed to be...

9 comments:

  1. I was wondering the same thing. i saw one comment last night on arutzsheva about the kind of candidates, but couldnt find any updates this morning. how sad.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was also surprised, given the importance of Abutbul's win for Shas on a national level.

    OTOH, we're certainly not as important as Yerushalayim

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually, I was listening to Kol Chai this morning, and they did mention the Beit Shemesh Elections. They noted that Abutbol beat out the incumbent (as if that is who the real race was between) and also pointed out that Moshe (sic) Lerner received 30% of the votes!

    Insignificant indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  4. It might have been on Kol Chai because of the greater importance due to the Haredi element...

    ReplyDelete
  5. True.

    I guess my sarcastic tone was lost though, as I was really pointing out that even though our city and its elections did get honorable mention, the announcer didn't get the real scoop, let alone the correct names! Oh well...

    ReplyDelete
  6. sorry blackbelt. i actually got that part of it, but I thought the main point was that it did get mentioned...

    anyways thanks for commenting..

    ReplyDelete
  7. here is an article from haaretz about long serving mayors being ousted. No mention of bet Shemesh and our 15 year mayor... http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1036733.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. The main importance of this election - as testified by the amount of campaigning by gimmel and shas - those on the national level - is for the chareidim.

    There needs to be a serious solution to the housing / zoning problem for the chareidim who need places within the green line to live. The hope is that now RBS 3,4,5 etc will come around and will all be chareidi

    ReplyDelete
  9. didn't abutbol very publicly promise to balaish and labor that rbs gimmel would be chiloni, or at least mostly chiloni?

    ReplyDelete

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