(November 8, Sunday) Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer actually made great advances by pushing the Haredi Vote Towards the secular parties where their votes are now diluted. Yasher koach to Rabbi Pfeffer! Paul Mendlowitz
The haredi population of Israel keeps growing, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the country. By that logic, the haredi parties should gain power with every election. Instead, they emerged from this one significantly weakened. What happened?
Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer leads the Iyun Institute and chairs the rabbinic committee of Hatzibur HaHaredi, one of four new haredi parties in the race.
He joins Jonathan Silver to explain how Shas and United Torah Judaism differ, what each campaigned on, and how the haredi parties went from kingmakers to fixed members of Netanyahu’s bloc. He also discusses why Shas lost so much of its traditional following to Likud and Otzma Yehudit, and why none of the new parties, his own included, came close to the threshold. This conversation was recorded on October 29, before final results were certified. Pfeffer’s Mosaic essay making the case for Hatzibur HaHaredi: https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essay...