Politician’s Jailing Deepens Divide in Israel

RAMLE, Israel —  With thousands of mournful supporters cheering him on, one of Israel’s most powerful ultra-Orthodox politicians went to prison Sunday and instantly became a martyr for Sephardic Jewry.

Aryeh Deri, the charismatic former leader of the Shas Party, began a three-year sentence for bribery and fraud, capping a political and legal drama that has endured for nearly a decade. To the trumpet-like calls of a shofar, or ram’s horn, and lively tunes from a pop band, Deri bade farewell to an emotional crowd that rallied for hours in front of the Nitzan prison and likened its hero to Abraham, Moses and a new king.

“Your prayers will go through these prison walls, melt the iron bars and lead to the redemption of Israel,” Deri shouted from a stage where he was flanked by a host of senior rabbis and Shas lawmakers.

The hoopla surrounding the Deri conviction and incarceration highlighted the deep ethnic and religious divides that continue to fracture Israeli society, and it could energize his movement. Deri’s supporters are convinced that he was persecuted by Israel’s Ashkenazi elite only because he is a Sephardic rabbi who was too successful. His critics say he broke the law.

Until his conviction on corruption charges a year and a half ago, at the end of one of Israel’s longest trials, Deri was a sought-after power broker capable of making or breaking governments because of the votes he could deliver or withhold.

He was forced to step down as formal leader of Shas after a court found him guilty of accepting $155,000 in bribes and abusing a five-year stint heading the Interior Ministry to enrich himself--a judgment that only embittered his largely underclass followers, who believe that Ashkenazi-crafted Israeli laws discriminate against them.

Government officials, who separately moved Sunday to dismantle Israel’s Religious Affairs Ministry, dismissed Deri’s portrayal of himself as one of the persecuted downtrodden.

“This man is a criminal who took bribes and is trying to blame the entire world--his judges, his investigators, governments, ministries--for his felony,” Justice Minister Yossi Beilin told Israeli radio.

Ex-Party Leader Sees ‘Campaign of Hatred’

Deri’s comments at Sunday’s sunbaked rally were relatively mild, but he used a series of interviews in ultra-Orthodox newspapers and on Shas’ pirate radio stations to lash out at what he branded a leftist media and unreligious government that have waged a “campaign of hatred” aimed at putting him behind bars.

At the rally, he urged his followers to use “the pain inflicted against us” to convert more souls to Orthodox Judaism. He and other leaders repeatedly chanted an 800 number that the faithful can call to help send more children to religious schools.

Indeed, Shas can be expected to capitalize on the momentary setback of Deri’s jailing to attract new followers, launching what Deri on Sunday called the “Sephardic Revolution.” Analysts here were predicting that Deri may emerge from his incarceration stronger and more popular than ever--”a saint, tested in the trials of imprisonment,” as columnist Nahum Barnea put it.

Above the rally, however, a motorized hang glider buzzed the crowd with a different label for Deri: “Thief Number One,” the fluttering banner declared.

Sephardic Jews trace their heritage to Middle Eastern and North African countries, while the Ashkenazi are of European descent. Hundreds of thousands of Sephardim who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s did indeed suffer real discrimination by the Jewish state’s European-born founders. Despite generations of intermarriage, many in both groups have retained some of the customs and tastes of their native lands, often reflected in dress, foods and language.

Many in the Deri send-off crowd recounted tales of bigotry and deprivation that they or their parents remember suffering at the hands of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite, which, they believe, continues to dominate the judicial system that convicted Deri and the government that allowed it to happen.

Activists Call for Equal Treatment

A favorite poster at the Deri rally showed Deri and former President Ezer Weizman, who resigned recently amid corruption allegations but was never charged. Weizman--the epitome of the Ashkenazi elitist--received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a French businessman, the posters claimed, but is allowed to retire to his comfortable home in Caesarea, while Deri goes to jail for alleged crimes involving a lot less money.

“Aryeh Deri is going to prison because he doesn’t have green eyes,” said Yaacov Shetrit, a kippa-clad Moroccan-born tailor who came to the rally to support the former Shas leader.

Shetrit recalled the day in 1958, shortly after he arrived in Israel, when the owner of a clothing store admired his sewing and was ready to hire him--until Shetrit acknowledged his roots. “To this day, I remember the pain,” Shetrit said. “I do not remember the man’s name, but I remember the store, on Shenken Street in Tel Aviv,” he said, referring to a thoroughfare that is synonymous with Israel’s secular upper class.

“Aryeh Deri has made it possible for us to hold our heads up high,” said a 37-year-old mother of five who was covered in miniature stickers of Deri’s face and who would give only her first name, Ayelah. “He made it possible for us to speak the word of the Bible out loud.”

Ayelah, whose parents immigrated to Israel from Yemen, said Deri was being imprisoned because the government wants to stop the spread of Torah study, a pet project of the Shas Party. Shas runs its own state-financed school system, which others in the government say has squandered millions of dollars.

The vast majority of Sunday’s demonstrators were Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, the men dressed in black hats or velvet kippot, the women--congregated separately from the men--with long skirts and their hair covered.

Deri is able to amass and hold his following, Israeli analysts say, because he exploits the long-simmering resentments of the underclass and the widening, explosive alienation between society’s haves and have-nots.

“At first glance, [the Deri demonstrations are] an expression of outrage by those who have not fully recognized the rule of law and the bitter burden of justice, who have not internalized democratic values, who are angry on the basis of ethnicity and religion,” commentator Amnon Danker wrote this week. “But at the end of the day, despite the Versace suits and pricey ministerial cars of the protest’s leaders, this is a paupers’ rebellion.”

Under Deri’s guidance, Shas grew from a tiny party to the third-largest in Israel’s parliament, stunning establishment observers in last year’s election by nearly doubling the votes it won over previous balloting. The election was held two months after Deri’s conviction.

Despite campaign pledges that he would not allow ultra-Orthodox politicians to get the better of him, Prime Minister Ehud Barak quickly turned to Shas after his election and invited the party into his coalition.

Shas quit the coalition in July over territorial concessions that Barak was prepared to make to Palestinians in the critical Camp David summit talks. The departure of Shas and a couple of other smaller parties left Barak without a functioning government, a crisis from which he has yet to emerge.

Still, some of Barak’s allies held out hope for making peace with Shas.

“This is the time to heal the wounds,” said Shlomo Ben-Ami, public security minister and acting foreign minister and himself a respected Sephardi politician. “And this isn’t only the duty of people outside of Shas. Members of Shas must also reconcile themselves with state institutions and with the law.”