Jul 19, 2026

New Haredi faction for elections

There is a Haredi election campaign running that looks like it could make things interesting.

We have seen in some previous elections attempts by new political formations in the Haredi community. A new party will form and run in the elections and the traditional Haredi parties will push hard against them leading to combinations of social threats against the people behind the new party along with pressure to drop out so as to not waste votes and to not take away votes from the traditional parties. In the past, with just a small number of semi-recent exception, the new parties do not even make it to the finish line and drop out well before the elections. TOV and DERECH were the exceptions that I can think of offhand and they continued to run all the way to the end (and even won some mandates) in municipal elections but not in national elections, and there was a Hared women's party that ran to the end of but ended up very weak after a tough campaign against them and beyond their actual existence did not really accomplish anything significant with their run achieving a very small pool of votes.

There has been talk in recent monthsof several new Haredi parties being formed. I saw one that would compete directly with Shas being formed by a Rav Abergil. I am aware of another that seemed to me to be a yeshivish anglo (or maybe part anglo) party, though I havent heard anything about them recently. I am hearing of another party being formed by groups like Rav Betzalel Cohen and others he is working with. We'll see what comes of all these and if they can withstand the pressure that will surely be levied on them. These are the traditional formations of parties and what normally happens to them as the elections approach.

There is a new campaign out there right now an dit is different than the traditional.


Instead of forming a new party and trying to garner support and withstand the pressures that are certainly coming, Motti Leitner, a municipal politician from Bet Shemesh (from the DERECH parrty) is now running  a 2 million shekel campaign for the upcoming elections. He formed a faction, called "HaTzibbur Hacharedi"  - the Haredi Public, and instead of campaigning for this as a party looking for support, he is campaigning right now to push the traditional Haredi parties to take him in as a representative of his facton. According to the current campaign, UTJ and Shas are both made up of various factions, and Hatzibbus Hacharedi would simply be another faction in the umbrella and would be given a specific slot on whichever list accepts him to represent his faction. His campaign is not seeming to target UTJ or Shas specifically but I think naturally it would be more in line with UTJ, though practically I think Shas might have a higher chance of adopting him (not that they will but that the chances are higher in my opinion).

Leitner's campaign is pointing out that yeshiva bochurim have become targets, the honor of Torah has been trampled, families are being crushed under financial burdens. These are traditional Haredi issues and technically exactly what the traditional Haredi parties supposedly deal with... so why is this new faction necessary? They say new blood needs to be infused into the traditional parties, more representation of the younger generation.
source: i24 News

Interestingly, DERECH, the party Leitner heads in Bet Shemesh, did not run a municipal campaign on traditional Haredi issues but seemed to represent the community called the "modern Haredim" which are young couples ansd families many of whom work and are not learning in yeshivas and have concerns other than things like the traditional concern of Haredi draft and money for yeshivas and the like, so I find it interesting that they are moving away from that and trying to bring the traditional campaigns to the younger crowd they claim to represent. I look forward to seeing how this develops..





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1 comment:

  1. If this guy thinks for a second that- regardless of ideology- the UTJ- which spends four years delicately balancing between *two* factions and their sub-factions- is going to admit *another* faction from the outside, he's dreaming. Or he's preparing something else.

    ReplyDelete

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