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It's not really about Shabbat By Avirama Golan Tags: Shabbat The poor yeshiva students in Beit Shemesh and Bnei Brak did not know what to do with their Shefa Shuk supermarket vouchers last week. It seemed a shame to throw the vouchers away, since they could use them to buy cheap food for the Passover holiday. On the other hand, Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashiv and the Gur Rabbi had signed an edict protesting the chain's parent company for desecrating the Sabbath. Relief and deliverance arrived from an unexpected place. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who knows only that Shefa Shuk has branches in Afula, Dimona and other peripheral towns where hundreds of thousands of Shas supporters live, asked the ultra-Orthodox council for the sanctity of the Sabbath not to declare a public boycott. The Ashkenazi yeshiva students immediately began selling their vouchers to the Sephardi students for half off and went to shop at the competing chain, Alef. Meanwhile, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods were filled with colorful posters whose number and sophistication surpassed even those hung during the protests against El Al and the Supreme Court. The ultra-Orthodox public knows that strong economic interests are hiding behind the "campaign for the Sabbath." At the beginning of the week, Bnei Brak was rife with conspiracy theories that sought to explain the complicated affair. One claimed a rich businessman who was competing with Shefa Shuk was fueling the fight in order to boost his own supermarket chain, which was about to be sold based on its income over the past three months. Another explained that a wealthy man was interested in making Shefa Shuk collapse for even more convoluted reasons. Advertisement Even if the rumors were exaggerated, or perhaps fabricated, it is clear to all that the Sabbath is a marginal issue in this conflict. And indeed, the struggle began as a bona fide matter but morphed and gained momentum to reach its current proportions. The issue was sparked by Roni Manela, a Gur representative in Tel Aviv city hall, who denounced what he called the collapse of the status quo on religious affairs as well as a social injustice. The big supermarket chains, he said, and first and foremost the AM:PM chain, which is open around the clock, are competing unfairly with small grocery stores and forcing them to give up their day of rest. Quite a few secular people would have been able to identify with Manela's protest had he not been joined by several young ultra-Orthodox entrepreneurs, some of them with interests in other supermarket chains. They began persecuting Dudi Weissman, who controls both AM:PM and Shefa Shuk, while ignoring Lev Leviev, who owns 26% of the chain and also earns a good profit from Highway 6 and from Channel 9, both of which operate on the Sabbath. Big deal, the ultra-Orthodox say. No one touches Leviev, who recently made an ostentatious appearance at a gathering of Bucharan Jews in the company ofa leading rabbi. Leviev, who strictlyobserves kashrut and Shabbat, was the guest of honor at a Gur Hasidim dinner in Italy, and condemns the secular Zionists who destroyed the state. Only Weissman is suddenly the enemy of Judaism. The discontent over this well-funded fight is starting to percolate upward, and in the Friday edition of Hamodia, the Agudat Yisrael party newspaper, the rabbis' spokesman explained "what the campaign is all about and why the plot to open dozens of shops on the Sabbath so endangers the Sabbath in the land of Israel." It is true that the public listens to the rabbis, the spokesman said, but "a wave of publications and all kinds of false information have brought people to ask questions." Hamodia listed these questions and answered them one by one, as if this were the Passover seder. To explain why this is happening now, Hamodia stated that Shalom Fischer, one of the owners of Shefa Shuk, left the chain because it was desecrating the Sabbath, and that the affair has been gaining momentum since then. But what Hamodia forgot to mention was that Fischer moved to Supersol, a partner in a rival ultra-Orthodox chain. The long article failed to say who is funding this massive, unparalleled publicity campaign. Meanwhile, the chief victims of the affair are both the poor yeshiva students and the Sabbath. The issue of an official day of rest should concern both the religious and the secular, and should involve weighty cultural, social and moral questions. Well-ordered countries maintain an official day of rest when all commerce halts, other than a few authorized food stores and emergency services. These establishments rest on another day. Israeli society should relate seriously to the Sabbath law and show national responsibility for the worker's right to rest on the day that Hebrew tradition gave the world. This cultural and social fight should be waged with political and public tools by those with society's good in mind. However, the people who initiated the ultra-Orthodox boycott do not fit this definition. In the worst-case scenario, they wish to coerce Israeli society into their way of life. In another bad-case scenario, they are seeking to profit. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Breaking with the ZOA Is Harvard University's Progressive Jewish Alliance inciting against Israel? Rising in the polls New survey finds Nasrallah is the most admired leader in the Arab world.

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