No religious bloc in sight

The first and last time all the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset managed to form a single joint electoral list was 60 years ago. The four parties that ran together - Agudat Yisrael, Poalei Agudat Yisrael, Hamizrahi and Hapoel Hamizrahi - won 16 seats.

Now, as the prospect of new elections looms, two famous sons of two even more famous rabbis - Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the son of Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef - want to resurrect the joint religious front. Their basic assumption is that the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties will win more seats if they run together than they would running separately. Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, talks about two stages: First the religious bloc will become a core component of the government, "and will stop being a beggar who relies on the favors of the secular government," and then the religious bloc will itself become the ruling party, from which the prime minister emerges.

The optimism evinced by Eliyahu and Yosef stems from polls conducted before the previous elections, when the religious bloc was expected to win 30-35 seats. But no such bloc came into being, and the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties won "only" 27 seats (12 went to Shas, nine to the National Union-National Religious Party, and six to United Torah Judaism).

But this is where the optimism more or less levels off. While Eliyahu does represent the position of his father, who is currently ill and has previously attempted to advance such a bloc, Yosef is not generally identified with his father's views. But that is the least of the problems facing the rabbis who envision a unified religious bloc.

Unlike previous election campaigns, when it was the religious Zionists who chased after the ultra-Orthodox in the hopes of collaborating, this time the religious Zionists have precious little motivation for working together to create a religious bloc. The newspaper Besheva, which most closely represents the Hardal (Zionist ultra-Orthodox) stream, may have dedicated a "Question of the Week" section to the possibility of such a bloc being created, but recent comments by various religious Zionist rabbis, responding to the ultra-Orthodox rejection of conversions conducted by the religious Zionist rabbi Haim Druckman, signal which way the wind is blowing.

Rabbi Benjamin Lau, who heads the beit midrash of Jerusalem's Beit Morasha, and is also the rabbi of the Himmelfarb religious high school for boys and Pelech religious high school for girls, both in Jerusalem - thinks the Ashkenazi Lithuanians (non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox) are doing everything they can to turn Israeli Jews off Judaism. "According to their worldview, mutual responsibility applies only within their inner circles, and they don't consider the fate of the State of Israel to be part of their agenda," said Lau. "They don't send their sons into the line of fire. They don't send their daughters to do national service. They live off charity and refuse to participate and shoulder the burden of the people of Israel. They cynically undermine the little bit being done by religious Zionist rabbis, who try to pitch in and help out with the general problems of society, whether on the matter of shmita [the agricultural sabbatical in effect this year] or on the matter of conversion."

Lau is among those who have called for the establishment of a rabbinical hierarchy, to provide religious services and to operate rabbinical courts, that would be identified with the values of the state in which it operates.

Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, who heads the Petah Tikva hesder yeshiva, speaks in a similar vein. At a conference dedicated to the memory of onetime National Religious Party leader Zevulun Hammer, which was held a few days ago at Bar-Ilan University, Cherlow referred to the possibility of establishing a religious bloc as a "mighty dream, but one that cannot be fulfilled."

"The Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox world does not count us and does not recognize us," Cherlow said. "That's also how it treats the Hasidim and the Sephardim. What kind of unity can I talk about if I am facing a great rabbi and he tells me that my kitchen isn't kosher and my dishes aren't kosher because I used them to eat heter metchira vegetables," he asked, referring to the rabbinic loophole, favored by religious Zionists and opposed by the ultra-Orthodox, that allows Jewish farmers to market their produce if they "sell" their land to non-Jews during the sabbatical year.

"Those who are not willing to allow a woman into the Knesset cannot unite with us," said Cherlow. "We will not sell off 51 percent of religious Zionism in the name of unity." Cherlow was more concerned by the split within religious Zionism, and called on his fellow religious Zionists to turn compromise and concession into holy words, or else there will be no chance of unity even within religious Zionism.

As if this were not enough, in an article published last Friday on the subject of Druckman's conversions and the dignity of religious Zionism, Rabbi Hagai Gross - the former director of the Tzohar organization, which was founded by religious Zionist rabbis who want to take part in shaping the image of Judaism in Israel - raised several possibilities aimed at making the ultra-Orthodox realize that the religious Zionists are also resolute and self-confident. Gross suggested considering the option of boycotting the family celebrations of ultra-Orthodox relatives "if the kashrut there does not meet our demands," or explaining to people collecting money for the ultra-Orthodox community, "who knock on our doors from time to time," that given the spiritual war the ultra-Orthodox have declared on the religious Zionist Torah world, "we will not be able to help you this time."

When this is the atmosphere, it is hard to imagine a united religious bloc becoming a reality, unless the leaders of ultra-Orthodoxy - rabbis Ovadia Yosef, Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and Mordechai Eliyahu - force the parties to unite, a possibility that at this stage seems unrealistic.