Word: agudat
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...giveaway was designed to protest a proposed ban on the sale of pork by Jewish businesses. The pork law was one of four concessions the government made to the small ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel party last week in return for a coalition agreement. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir also promised to impose further restrictions on abortion, curb public transportation on the Sabbath, and outlaw certain forms of advertising deemed obscene by religious leaders...
...March 15, Labor leader Shimon Peres has been scrambling to put together a new government without his party's nemesis, the conservative Likud bloc. Early last week Peres appeared to have sewn up 61 of the Knesset's 120 votes. But on Wednesday two Deputies of the religious party Agudat Yisrael backed out of a signed agreement, leaving Peres two votes short of a majority...
What made this latest twist so extraordinary is that the defection was manufactured by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, 88, who heads the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., and has never been to Israel. On Sunday, Agudat Deputy Avraham Verdiger phoned the spiritual leader's office for political guidance. The rabbi's spokesmen implied that this was the first contact between Jerusalem and Brooklyn. Others familiar with Schneerson's modus operandi say that a message had already been transmitted from Brooklyn making plain the rabbi's desire to derail Peres...
Peres is also pursuing alliances with several tiny religious parties in the hope of achieving a Knesset majority without Likud's help. Peres is especially lobbying the ultraorthodox Agudat Yisrael (two seats) and the National Religious Party (four seats), a mainstream Orthodox group that is holding out for the Ministries of Religious Affairs, Education and Interior. Yet the National Religious Party complicated Peres' task last week by announcing that it would join only a wider coalition that included Likud...
Orthodox rabbis already have wide civil powers. They approve all marriages, divorces and adoptions. Their political clout, moreover, grew during the Begin years. In order to win the support of Agudat Yisrael, the religious party that had four sometimes crucial seats in the Knesset, Begin made several concessions. He forbade El Al flights on the Sabbath, losing an estimated $30 million a year, and pushed through a law limiting autopsies, which violate Orthodox beliefs. Begin also agreed to push the highly controversial "Who is a Jew?" legislation, which would amend Israeli law to ensure that the only converts granted citizenship...