NEWS FEATURE: Party helps bring once-secular Sephardic Jews back to religion

c. 1997 Religion News Service BE’ER YA’ACOV, Israel _ It was just over a year ago when Haim Nygo, a maintenance man in this town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, accompanied Rabbi Avraham Buskila, on an errand that would change his life. “The rabbi asked me to help him bring palm fronds for a […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

BE’ER YA’ACOV, Israel _ It was just over a year ago when Haim Nygo, a maintenance man in this town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, accompanied Rabbi Avraham Buskila, on an errand that would change his life. “The rabbi asked me to help him bring palm fronds for a succah,”said Nygo, referring to the decorated sheds religious Jews build outdoors to eat in during the harvest festival of Succot.”Along the way we got to talking about work pressures, domestic problems, you know the usual,”Nygo recalled.”Somewhere in the conversation the rabbi stopped me and said, `Listen, the material world is empty, let me fill it for you with meaning.'” Nygo became the right-hand man of the rabbi, a small, bearded man who operates the town’s welfare department, serves as its vice-mayor and is also a local activist in Shas, the controversial party of Orthodox Jews of Middle Eastern, or Sephardic, descent.

Shas is a Hebrew acronym drawn from the party’s full name, which roughly translates into English as the Sabbath Observant Sephardic Party. The acronym also is a reference to the Talmud, the authoritative body of Jewish law.


On Buskila’s request, Nygo began scouting out poor families who needed holiday food baskets and arranged for their delivery. He also began fixing leaky pipes and broken electric fixtures for public housing tenants who could not afford to pay.

Somewhere along the line, Nygo also began praying and studying, and going to synagogue every evening to set up chairs and tables for Buskila’s classes, which draw restless youths in search of meaning and elderly craving companionship.”Today, I feel like a new man,”said the middle-aged Nygo.”You know what this movement called Shas has done for our town? It used to be hard to muster up the 10 men necessary to hold a religious service. Now the synagogues are overflowing.” Across Israel, Sephardic Jews, who grew up in a secular Israeli society that scorned traditional Judaism in general, and their Middle Eastern-brand of faith and tradition in particular, are returning to religion _ many of them thanks to Shas.

According to Tamar Herman, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, nearly 60 percent of Israelis define themselves as religious or”traditional”_ about 10 percent more than a decade ago.

Shas can be credited with a good portion of the shift. In 10 years time it has grown from a small, ethnically-based movement into the largest religious political party in Israel and boasts 10 of the Knesset’s 120 members.

Since more than 2 million Israelis _ more than 40 percent of the population _ are of Sephardic origin, Shas has plenty of room to expand, observers believe.

The return to traditionalism symbolized by the growth of Shas is transforming Israel’s self-image from an ardently secular and security- conscious country into one where significant portions of the Israeli public prefer to heed the advice of rabbis and mystics, rather than generals and politicians.

For secular, upper-middle class Israelis _ as well as for many American Jews _ it is an image both frightening and bewildering in which they fear intolerance will grow rampant as Orthodox institutions grow rich on government funds culled from tax dollars.


Indeed, Shas has been involved in its share of corruption scandals, including a still-pending case against top political leader Aryeh Deri. The party’s mystical inclinations are also well documented: In the 1996 general elections, Shas blessings and amulets were distributed to voters who followed the party’s dictates.

Most recently, Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, one of the leading Orthodox scholars of modern times, personally vetoed a carefully drafted compromise proposal to settle a longtime dispute over the rights of Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel on matters of conversion and marriage.

Yet at the grassroots, a very different picture of the Sephardic religious movement emerges. In Sephardic communities like Be’er Ya’acov, Shas activists such as Buskila have gained a reputation for selfless community work _”people who work night and day for others,”as Nygo put it.

On a national level, as well, the party has assumed a role as the political advocate for poor Jewish and even Arab-Israeli communities, many of them isolated backwaters neglected for decades by liberal Labor and hawkish Likud governments alike.”Shas is operating in an enormous vacuum that the social welfare state of Israel has left,”said Yossi Dahan, a resident of Be’er Ya’acov and a sociologist at Israel’s Open University.”But Shas doesn’t just offer social support, it offers identification. Shas recognizes the special identity and culture of Middle Eastern Jews _ an identity that underwent a marginalization in the early years of the state. Shas wants to revitalize and re-glorify that culture,”Dahan said.

Nygo said”the party of Shas has developed, and will continue to develop, because it gives help to the needy. Shas takes from the government and gives to the poor.” Nygo, who grew up in a family of eleven children in a one-room”transit camp”for Sephardic immigrants, attended a school in which Sephardic and European-born Jewish students were segregated, and where Sephardic youngsters were”streamed”into low-paying trades and jobs.

Directly, or indirectly, Shas helped change that.

The party opened schools in which Sephardic youngsters were welcomed, and in which academic training was stressed along with religious and vocational subjects. It opened a network of day care centers charging rates far below those of more mainstream nurseries _ thus offering poor mothers a chance to go to work and boost the family’s income.”Shas has invested in education in a big way. They understood that without a good education, nothing else can move socially,”said Haim Maimon, a Jerusalem rabbi of Sephardic origins, who is not affiliated with Shas.


Smadar Tzahalon is one of the many young people who has gained an education and an awareness of her”roots”thanks, partly, to Shas. She is the third daughter in an Egyptian Jewish family that immigrated to Israel in the 1960s and readily adopted the secular lifestyle then prevalent.”Except for kiddush (the traditional Sabbath blessings over wine) we were totally non-religious,”said the tall, lanky, high school senior at the Be’er Ya’acov Girls Seminary.

But when her older sister began to rebel as a teenager, her father, a garbage collector, became worried and sent her off to a religious boarding school. Smadar followed her sister to the school, became observant, and gained a reputation as a talented student.”I was drawn to religion because of the way I saw religious people behave, the sense of caring and concern for the other,”said Tzahalon.”Thanks to us girls, all of my family has returned to observance.” It is the Shas-style tolerance for non-religious Jews that has made the movement appealing among masses of not-so-observant voters.

Yet there is no room in Shas philosophy for tolerance toward other religious Jewish streams, such as the Reform and Conservative movements, which are demanding a formal role in Israeli religious life.”For us, the Reform Jews are worse than the secular Jews,”said Buskila.”Secular Jews don’t want to change religious law, they just want to be left alone. We have no problem living with them in honor and mutual respect. But Reform Jews want to perform marriages or conversions to Judaism in a way that runs counter to Jewish tradition,”the 42-year-old rabbi said.

As Buskila describes it, the struggle with the non-Orthodox movements, which are still relatively new to Israel, is just the latest stage in the long cultural battle waged by Sephardic against the corrupting pressures of change.”Reform Jews want to come here from America and create a revolution,”he said.”We’re not engaged in a war against western culture, but we’re in a war against those who want to change Jewish tradition. The struggle is over the essence of Judaism.” IR END FLETCHER

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!