An Israeli Prodigy Stumbles

...On at least two occasions in recent years when the Attorney General's office considered calling him in for questioning on matters where his testimony would have been useful, the party threatened civil unrest if an effort was made to follow through...

...Rabbinical "sponsorship," however, demands absolute obedience...

...Naturally, we did not attempt to enjoy a minute of it, lest we be overcome with guilt for playing while the aquifers were drying up...

...He claimed the funds for that purchase were a gift from the Werderbers, a New York couple who years ago visited Israel and, in effect, adopted his orphaned wife Yafa...

...Werderber to line up her story with his, but tapes that he turned over to police (in a remarkable tactical blunder) showed that she refused to lie on his behalf...

...But Sheikh Yassin has long been looked upon as filling a role in Hamas that is more comparable to that of Rabbi Yosef...

...The move had a certain "we'll show them" quality to it...

...Deri is said to have used the money he accepted to move to increasingly better apartments in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof, and to furnish his newest home with such luxuries as a Jacuzzi, something Chief Judge Ya'acov Tzemah made a special point of mentioning in his decision...

...When a generally sympathetic TV reporter tried to put a question to Deri, Yosef intervened, telling him to go to hell and telling Deri, "I forbid you to answer...

...On March 25, Deri and his codefendants returned to the Jerusalem District Court for a presentencing hearing...

...Aryeh Deri's problem, nevertheless, is that he has been found guilty of crossing the line between influence-peddling and filling his own pockets...

...All power emanates from the particular Torah sages their Knesset members look to for instructions...

...Certainly having a universally respected rabbi to point to provides good cover for Shas shenanigans...

...he moves comfortably in many worlds...

...Nonetheless, when Shas announced its Knesset list on March 29, Deri's name was at the top, although more than a month ago he said he planned to retire from the Knesset...

...They deeply resent their treatment at the hands of the Ashkenazi ruling elite since coming to Israel from Morocco or Yemen or Iraq...

...Sitting next to him in the living room, crowded with television crews and supporters, was Rabbi Yosef, who apparently had never participated in such an event...

...To say that it is risky to publicly criticize or question Rabbi Yosef is an understatement...

...It was sad to see him reduced to buffoonish proportions for having placed his trust in a brilliant young protégé who put his talents to use for self-aggrandizement and later self-preservation...

...In fact, sources within the party are already saying that if Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was able to go on directing the terrorist Hamas from inside an Israeli prison for nine years, Deri can do the same with Shas...

...Shortly afterward she died in a car accident...

...In any event, as the Israeli government prepares to declare the country officially in a state of drought, Shas seems headed into stormy weather...

...one of the j obs of political parties is to deliver funds for their constituents' needs...

...Interestingly, Deri himself is the rare ultra-Orthodox politician who has taken positions on issues of national significance: An unabashed dove, he recently let it be known that he would support an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Syria...

...But even within Shas, Deri is an exception to the rule...

...That is the way it works in Israel...

...In the last elections it won 10 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, as compared with 32 for the Likud-GesherTsomet group, and 34 for Labor...

...He is unusual, too, in the alliances and friendships he has made with secular politicians and with members of the press...

...One of my favorites was his reference to Deri's appearance in London at the deposition of an English witness for the prosecution, Martin Brown...

...This is important, because he has stood at the head of Shas almost from its emergence on the national scene, in 1984, when he was still in his 20s (today he is all of 40...

...Together with three other defendants, Deri was found guilty of bribery, fraud and breach of trust...

...Since then, Deri has never missed an opportunity to declare Rabbi Yosef The Boss, yet it has not been completely clear the tail isn't wagging the dog...

...It has become almost a truism that many "traditional" Sephardi Jews will go to the synagogue on Sabbath morning and drive to a soccer game, or to a public park to have a barbecue, in the afternoon...

...In return for securing government support for a Shassponsored yeshiva in Har Nof, he is believed to have taken a steady stream of kickbacks from the yeshiva and to have used some of the money to buy an apartment...

...Thus in 1992, when Deri brought Shas into the coalition headed by the Labor Party's Yitzchak Rabin with the blessings of Rabbi Yosef, but in defiance of Rabbi Schach, Yosef became the supreme Shas authority...

...The amount Deri reportedly collected over a period of five years, when he was assistant to the Interior Minister and then director general of the Ministry, adds up to the not so impressive sounding sum of $ 155,000...

...About half of Shas' supporters are estimated to be "traditional," or even secular, Sephardim...

...One of these prodigies was Moroccan-born Aryeh Deri, who was admitted into Jerusalem's prestigious Hebron Yeshiva...

...Deri sent one of his lieutenants to New York to get Mrs...

...That tradition is far more easygoing than the Ashkenazi Orthodoxy of the non-Hasidic and Hasidic varieties...

...It thus turned itself into an organization representing the roughly half of Israel's Jewish population that emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East's Arab nations in the early years of the state...

...The message couldn't have been clearer: Testify against me and you will forever be branded a rat in our community...

...The Party, whose name is a play on the acronym for Sephardi Torah Guardians, as well as a reference to the six orders of the Mishnah, has promised to "return the glory of yore" to all Sephardi Jews...

...Numerous other instances of the defendant's deviousness and hypocrisy were similarly cited...

...AFTER MOVING IN MANY WORLDS An Israeli Prodigy Stumbles By David Green Jerusalem The winter here was glorious: sunny blue skies and mild temperatures during the day, cool evenings that never dipped below freezing, and almostno rain (we have had only some 20 per cent of the average annual precipitation by this time of year...

...Pushed to the periphery of society, they have been afforded inferior educational opportunities and pressed to part with a religious tradition that is an important aspect of their lives...

...At the same time, Deri cultivated close links to Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, and convinced him of the need for a political organization that would advance the interests of the country's Sephardi population...

...internally they function in a distinctly undemocratic manner...

...Shas competed in the national elections for the first time in 1984, capturing four Knesset seats, an amazing showing...

...So did Rabbi Eliezer Schach, then the undisputed chief of Israel's non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox yeshivas...

...As its political power has grown, its ability to extract larger budgets from the government has expanded (it has been part of every coalition since entering the Knesset in 1984) and its services have been extended...

...This gave the defense an opportunity to parade a series of character witnesses before the judges, including former Chief of Staff Amnon Shahak (now the number two candidate on the new Centrist Party Knesset list), and former Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat...

...David Green, a new NL contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...

...In addition, written testimonies to Deri's integrity from such eminent and diverse figures as Shimon Peres, former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Education Minister Yitzchak Levy (of the National Religious Party, a major competitor of Shas for Orthodox votes), and liberal yeshiva head Rabbi Yehudah Amital...

...He accused Deri of doing everything possible to prevent the investigation against him from proceeding, despite his assertions of innocence, and then of complaining that he was being persecuted because the investigation and subsequent trial took nine years...

...The rest fit into the ultra-orthodox category, many of them "born-again" under the party's influence...

...It is frequently observed that Shas did not invent the system, it merely learned how to manipulate it better than anyone else...

...Moreover, while the party is to be admired, or at least respected, for the impressive educational and religious network it has created in a relatively short time, one should remember that it is teaching a brand of separatist fundamentalism...

...By far the most serious of the three offenses is receiving bribes, a felony that could send him to jail for seven years if his inevitable appeals are ultimately unsuccessful...

...Shas has built its strength slowly and steadily by setting up a network of day care centers, kindergartens, schools, and yeshivas in the country's poorer urban neighborhoods and towns...

...But the real complaint about the ultra-Orthodoxparties is that they do little besides take care of their own...

...The rabbi, in his traditional dark robe, embroidered with gold thread, and the sunglasses an ophthalmological condition forces him to wear, declared thatDeri was innocent "by our law," and shortly afterward ordered the press conference ended...

...No wonder the budget for Shas' schools went up more than 50 per cent this year...

...Shas has effectively capitalized on the strong feelings of disenfranchisement that many Mizrachi, or Eastern, Jews harbor...

...Judge Tzemah (who is a yarmulkewearing Sephardi, prompting the charge by Shas activists that he is a "court Jew") castigated Deri publicly for some two hours...

...The only surprise would be his not receiving jail time...

...As I write, it is a little more than two weeks before the April 15 date the judges set for Deri's sentencing...

...Yosef promised his patronage...

...Likud rules because its candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu, won the Prime Minister's race and was able to assemble a parliamentary majority...

...Wednesday, March 17, was one of those unseasonably warm, clear days...

...Indeed, Shas' continued growth depends on its convincing its followers that they are victims of an oppressive, racist society eagerto keep them out...

...Deri's unparalleled ability to twist reality to his own and his party's advantage has enabled him to get a lot of mileage out of the claim that he is a scapegoat...

...Externally the parties operate more or less within the framework of Israeli democracy...

...During the testimony, Deri sat at a table directly opposite Brown with a copy of the best-selling Hebrew thriller The Mark of Cain placed in front of him...

...Last September, when a teacher's strike delayed the opening of public schools 10 days or so, activists from Shas' El Hama'ayan school system stood outside the closed buildings and recruited pupils away: The independent ultra-Orthodox schools never experience teacher strikes and offer longer school days, plus lunch...

...Consequently, even as hardcore and rank-and-file Shasniks continue to swear loyalty to their disgraced chairman, if support for the party goes down in the May 17 general election, there could very well be a challenge to the authority of the man who built it from the ground up...

...It began, though, with a lightning bolt: the conviction of Shas Party leader Aryeh Deri, who (reflecting the definition of his given name) came into the Jerusalem District Court like a lion, but went out complaining he was a scapegoat...

...In the months preceding the Deri verdict, for example, as it began to look like conviction was unavoidable, Rabbi Yosef started to publicly attack the country's judicial system...

...Shimon Sheves, director general of the Prime Minister's Office under Yitzchak Rabin, was recently indicted for allegedly taking kickbacks that ranged somewhere between $5 million and $6 million...

...Shas is now the third largest political formation in Israel...

...The night of the day the verdict was announced, Deri held a press conference at his home...

...But along the way Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodoxy made its mark on the Sephardim, through the slow acceptance of the most capable young yeshiva students among them into the top Ashkenazi Torah academies...