Beit Shemesh, Israel – MO Claiming Charedim Seeking to Dominate Public Life

Beit Shemesh, Israel – The quarrel between Beit Shemesh’s heavily Anglo national-religious community and the city’s mayor reached new heights this week, as more than 200 people demonstrated Wednesday in front of city hall against a series of decisions they say favor the mayor’s Haredi constituency.

Tensions between the two parties have been high for several months, as national religious residents accuse the Haredi community, backed by Mayor Moshe Abutbol of Shas, of seeking to dominate public life in the city. Wednesday’s demonstration was sparked by Abutbol’s order to take off the city council’s agenda a discussion about allocating a plot of land to a young congregation led by English-speaking immigrants, which planned to build its first synagogue.

“We are the only community in Beit Shemesh that does not have a synagogue,” said Jason Schwartz, the U.S.-born president of a congregation in the city’s new Nofei Hashemesh neighborhood. “We are frozen out of having a shul by a mayor who says he needs to think about whether it’s necessary for our community to have a shul at this juncture.” A municipality official said the mayor’s decisions were based solely on “professional considerations.”

Spokesman Mati Rosenzweig said only 30 apartments out of a planned 700 are currently inhabited in the Nofei Hashemesh area. Thus it “would not be proper at this time to give this plot of land to one group… since this is the only public area in the neighborhood and is available to all its residents.”

Founded two years ago, the Nofei Hashemesh Congregation is led by Rabbi Shalom Rosner, a popular Modern Orthodox leader who left his teaching position at Yeshiva University and his pulpit in a wealthy New York suburb to head the new community. Today, more than 60 families – about half of them native English speakers – belong to his congregation, which gathers for Shabbat services in a local school. His daily Torah lectures are held in the basement of his house.

Schwartz says that when the congregation recently filed for the land allocation, municipality staff told them nobody else expressed interest in that parcel. “In fact, the ownership registration document for Nofei Hashemesh already marks the very spot where we want to build a beit knesset,” says Schwartz, who moved here from New Jersey in 2008.

The application was to be discussed earlier this month, Schwartz says, yet Abutbol removed it from the agenda. “There is no explanation other than ‘the mayor needs to evaluate it further,'” Schwartz says. He and Rabbi Rosner then had a meeting with the mayor who explained he first needed “to better understand the nature of Nofei Hashemesh” – which is adjacent to the Nofei Aviv and Sheinfeld neighborhoods – before he can decide whether to allocate the plot, Schwartz said.

Worst since 2007

Tensions between Haredim and non-Haredim in Beit Shemesh peaked in 2007 with a number of violent incidents but stayed mainly peaceful until Abutbol tried a few weeks ago to transfer the control of the city’s ritual baths, or mikvas, from a rabbi appointed by the city’s chief rabbinate to a representative of the Haredi community. Intense pressure from the national-religious community forced him to back down, several residents told Anglo File. The mayor also recently reassigned the allocation of a plot of land from a national-religious hesder yeshiva, which combines religious studies with army service, to Haredi institutions.

The city’s Rosenzweig told Anglo File that the yeshiva’s founders had not done anything in the last two years to advance its building and that their current location would serve their needs “for the coming years.” They also lacked the necessary funds and licenses to go ahead with their building project, Rosenzweig said. The mayor continuously invites non-Haredim to move to his city, he added.

Shalom Lerner, the leader of the city council’s largest opposition faction BeYachad, said the mayor does not have the right intervene in the allocation of land to Rabbi Rosner’s synagogue. “It’s not his job to say if the shul should be here or not,” Lerner, who was born in Brazil and grew up in the U.S., told Anglo File. “Abutbol’s very unfair to the non-Haredi population, he doesn’t understand their needs. Even worse, he doesn’t care about their needs.”

While Wednesday’s demonstration was planned impromptu, local activists are considering holding a much larger rally in the near future, Lerner said. “We’re also going to reach out to Knesset members and ministers to help us. They can’t just leave us alone.”