The Neve Eliahu neighborhood in Acre is one of the city’s newest sections, whose first residents moved in in 2017. A Garin Torani group (literally “Torah nucleus,” part of a religious Zionist movement that sets up communities in underdeveloped areas) that had arrived in the city a decade earlier was heavily involved in the neighborhood’s establishment. Neve Eliahu was earmarked for the religious Zionist public – an interview with a rabbi was a precondition for being accepted as a resident.
“The members of the garin managed to persuade the Israel Land Authority to revise the city’s master plan such that there would be detached, single-family homes in the neighborhood and it would be more attractive to the public,” says Dr. Yael Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, who studied the Garin Torani phenomenon for her doctoral dissertation (completed 2020) in Ben-Gurion University’s department of administration and public policy.
Veteran Jewish residents of Acre told Shmaryahu-Yeshurun that they were furious over this development. “Let’s put our cards on the table: They took the land so that the Arabs would not move into the area,” one resident said. Some of those she interviewed revealed that they had pretended to be religious in their acceptance interview. “You put a kippa on your head and go to see the rabbi. ‘Are you religiously observant?’ Sure I am – but only to get into the neighborhood, because a detached home that cost something like 800,000 shekels [six years ago] is now worth 1.3 million shekels [about $406,000],” another local resident told the researcher.
The Garin Torani in Acre is one of dozens of similar groups that are active in cities across Israel. In recent weeks they have been at the center of a firestorm on social media. Tweets with the hashtag #mitnahelod (“#settlerlod”), referring to the city of Lod, and other hashtags connected to activity by Torah nucleus groups elsewhere were posted by the thousands, amid heated quarrels between critics of the movement and its supporters. One bone of contention is the public resources that are allocated to these groups and the unnecessary friction between their members and the Arab populations in mixed Jewish-Arab cities, where the strongest groups usually establish themselves. Garin Torani groups also operate in “development towns” – communities established in the 1950s, largely in the south, for Mizrahi new immigrants – as well as in distinctly secular cities in the metropolitan Tel Aviv area.
By definition, their activity touches on the most sensitive fault lines in Israeli society: Arab-Jewish, Ashkenazi-Mizrahi and state-religion. The groups arrive with a systematic doctrine and a desire to wield influence according to their worldview, which is that of the religious, right-wing side of the political map.
There are also “nucleus”-type groups from other parts of the political map, through organizations such as Ayalim, which establishes student villages in order “to strengthen the Negev and Galilee”; and Dror Israel, whose motto is “educating for a just and equal Israel.” Often, the very arrival of an organized group in a town or city poses a problem.
“The idea for my study germinated after I had been part of an Ayalim student nucleus group in Dimona, about a decade ago,” Shmaryahu-Yeshurun relates. “Local residents were severely critical of our activity. I understood that this was a complex discourse. There is something about a garin that settles in a new place that can stir resistance, irrespective of social and political approaches of one kind or another. The sheer fact of their arrival intimates that the residents and the local government have a problem, that they are not strong enough or good enough. When ideology is added, it becomes complicated.”
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A view of the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood in Lod. An Arab school is adjacent to buildings of a Garin Torani group.
Ofer Vaknin
Friction and tension
The first Garin Torani group was founded at the end of the 1960s, in the northern border town of Kiryat Shmona. In the decades that followed, and in particular after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, additional groups were established. The murder, committed by a kippa-wearer and incited by certain rabbis, shook the whole religious Zionist community; some of its members thought that getting closer to the secular public was the correct response.
Another significant push occurred after Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Some within the religious Zionist population sought to realize in practice the notion of “settling in the hearts” of their fellow Israelis. The notion originates in a comment by Yoel Bin-Nun, a prominent rabbi of the settler movement, to the effect that the settlement project had successfully inhabited the hills in the Palestinian territories, but not the hearts of Israelis. From their perspective, members of the groups arrive filled with good intentions and a sincere wish to make a contribution and change things.
“The vision was to come as a garin, to assimilate and become part of the city, and to impart the strength we – religious Zionism – possess, to the whole community, to draw people together and raise the socioeconomic and demographic levels here in the city,” a member of the Acre group told Shmaryahu-Yeshurun. “The garin’s founding derived from that distress, when the city’s residents saw Acre lurching away from them from every direction,” she quotes a group member as saying, in her thesis.
“The religious nucleus groups are a welcome phenomenon,” Aharon Atias, director general of the Lod Municipality and a founder of that city’s Garin Torani group, tells TheMarker. “A person leaves their comfort zone, their natural surroundings, and says, ‘I want to be a partner to social activity, in an ideological project.'”
The present social media storm blew up against the backdrop of the violent events in the mixed cities that erupted during the Israeli operation in Gaza in May. Nothing justifies violence against law-abiding civilians, but when the dust settled somewhat, allegations were made against the Torah nucleus groups to the effect that the friction they generate in the heart of Arab populations in those cities created unnecessary tension.
Shmuel Shattach, a Lod resident, and the CEO of Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah (literally: Torah and Labor Party loyalists), a movement that seeks to restore religious Zionism to its roots – back to the days of the socialist predecessor to Habayit Hayehudi – objects to the political criticism directed at the nucleus groups over their activity in the mixed cities. However, he acknowledges that improvement is needed at the socioeconomic level.
Shmuel Shattach.
Noam Feiner
“Nucleus groups are something private, irrespective of whether they are secular or religious,” Shattach says. “As such, the state needs to limit the duration of its support for them and also set social indices for their activity. In many cases the Garin Torani hooks up with the strong population in a city and magnifies disparities, instead of reducing them. There are definitely gentrification issues here, and I see that in the religious education system, where in some cases nucleus groups brought about the exclusion of the population they were supposed to strengthen.”
The gentrification issue and its impact on local education appears to run like a thread through the activity of all the Garin Torani groups, including in Acre, residents told Shmaryahu-Yeshurun. The Jewish residents of Acre, who are by and large Mizrahi, complained to her about what seemed to them the arrogant attitudes of people in the garin, whom they saw as Ashkenazis from the religious Zionism elite. They referred to discrimination against Mizrahim among the religious public as well as within the education system.
“If you weren’t educated in their [school] frameworks, they don’t see you,” one resident told her. “Take the codes of a religious Sephardi public: Where is the child educated? In state schools, on the fringe of the secular plus a few religious hours. I don’t know whether the nucleus groups are the point, as much as the fact that the [establishment] religious population hasn’t been able to accept the religious Sephardi public from the periphery. It’s a battle between two communities. It’s the hard core of the whites coming to the hard core of the blacks.”
Gender segregation at the pool
Similar tensions are also present in the southern town of Mitzpeh Ramon. They arose in June over the gay pride parade there, in the wake of a remark by Mayor Roni Marom against the gay community, and his admission that he refused to draw on funds that were available from the Social Equality Ministry budget for events that benefit the community.
“The feeling was that Marom was echoing messages of rabbis and of senior figures in their community,” says a local resident who asked that his name not be used. “In the end, it’s all part of a general feeling in the past few years, which is shared by moderate secular and religious individuals alike, to the effect that the nucleus groups are gradually taking control of Mitzpeh Ramon. They already hold events with [gender] segregation, there’s disproportionate investments and resources allotted to them. Preschools in the town are now mostly religious – and there is even gender segregation at our municipal swimming pool.”
Religious settlement groups started arriving in Mitzpeh Ramon at the beginning of the 2000s. First was a hesder yeshiva – combining religious studies with some military service – that moved from Dimona at the initiative of Rabbi David Avihayil, the founder of the high school yeshiva in Mitzpeh Ramon. Later in the decade, a Garin Torani arrived. Many of its original members came from the hesder yeshiva and from the so-called Hardal public (an acronym for ultra-Orthodox religious Zionists) who also moved to the town. Since then, the religious Zionist community in Mitzpeh Ramon has developed around the yeshiva and the garin.
A participant in Mitzpeh Ramon’s first gay pride parade in June. No funding from the city.
Ilan Assayag
“Mitzpeh Ramon is undergoing a very singular process of gentrification,” says Dr. Reut Reina Bendrihem, an anthropologist who has studied the recent changes in the town. “Generally that term refers to the entry of a strong population that displaces economically weaker groups,” says Bendrihem, who teaches at both the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, and Sapir College in Sderot. “But here the story is different. We’re talking about a strong group – ideologically and also, perhaps, in terms of cultural capital – that comes to a place with a mission to upgrade the local population, which is ostensibly weaker. The group’s missions are to become local residents, draw the [other] residents closer to Judaism, ‘settle in their hearts’ and bring about [religious] acculturation. The result is that the veteran population is shunted out of the city or loses its ability to go on living there in the way it wishes.”
“During our research,” she continues, “testimony arrived about similar processes that are underway in Sderot, Yeruham, Ofakim and Dimona [all underprivileged Negev cities]. The method and the goals are the same: settlement, acculturation and making the local population stronger – and more Jewish. No one thinks about whether, perhaps, instead of this, it would be right to strengthen the periphery from within, organically, in a way that’s more appropriate to the local population’s way of life.”
According to Mitzpeh Ramon resident Dina Dayan, who has lived in the town all her life, “There are people who come to Mitzpeh from Tel Aviv and say, ‘I want my quiet.’ That’s fine. But the feeling about the nucleus group is different. They’ve come to save me, to educate my children, to give me the welfare services [they think] I need. They are working on Dina Dayan – I am their project. By dint of that they receive salaries and budgets, and they are changing the face of the town.”
One of the issues that inflames passions about the Torah nucleus groups lately has to do with the allocation of public housing to them, in Mitzpeh Ramon and elsewhere. According to Construction and Housing Ministry data obtained by Haaretz and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, since the start of the 2000s the ministry has been renting about 1,500 properties from its stock of public housing units to public bodies, including Garin Torani groups, though the exact number of such properties is unknown.
In a special report in 2013 about public housing, then-State Comptroller Joseph Shapira ordered these units returned to the stock of dwellings available for public housing. According to the Housing Ministry, since then about 400 residential units have been returned. An examination by TheMarker found that from 2014 until 2017, some 50 new apartments were rented by Amidar, the state-owned housing company, to public bodies, including Garin Torani groups, mainly in Mitzpeh Ramon, Yeruham and Dimona.
The chairman of Amidar during that period was Izhak Lax, who is now the CEO of Keren Kehilot, an umbrella organization for some 70 Garin Torani groups that lobbies government ministries on their behalf. “I know in the clearest possible way that not one apartment of public housing in Mitzpeh Ramon, and overall, is in the hands of any Garin Torani group,” Lax tweeted last month. In another tweet, Lax wrote that because there is no demand for public housing in Mitzpeh Ramon, Amidar apartments are being rented out at the full price, at the directive of the Housing Ministry.
Social workers in Mitzpeh Ramon, however, maintain that public housing units are very much needed and in demand there. “In the past two years alone, I have submitted five requests for public housing assistance for people I am looking after, who receive a rehabilitation package from the Health Ministry – and only one of them received an apartment,” says social worker Rachel Gilad-Wollner, a Mitzpeh Ramon resident who in the past was a member of the Tel Aviv city council. “These are people with mental disabilities that make it impossible for them to work. Despite their condition, they are not receiving apartments here, even though the Garin Torani group and the yeshivas have been given possession of such units.”
Religious protesters rally against the gay pride parade in Mizpeh Ramon, carrying signs saying ‘Mom, dad, family’ and ‘Family – The secret to our existence’
Eliyahu Hershkovitz
According to Housing Ministry data that were made available to TheMarker, of 89 public housing units in Mitzpeh Ramon that have been allocated to public bodies, 49 are being rented to the high school yeshiva, 14 to the hesder yeshiva and 27 have been allocated to the town’s local council – but there is no record of their being rented out since then.
A video clip on the YouTube channel of the hesder yeshiva, uploaded two years ago, indicates that in addition to the rental of the public housing units to nucleus groups in Mitzpeh Ramon, they also bought some of the units. “One of the significant moves made by the yeshiva occurred four years ago, in the form of our decision to buy the boarding school apartments, which were under the responsibility of Amigour [a public-housing group under the auspices of the Jewish Agency] and were classified as public housing,” the yeshiva’s CEO, Shmuel Koka, states in the filmed record of a fundraiser.
“As such,” he continued, “our stay in the apartments was dependent on the decision of the housing minister. But it was clear to us that we needed to be independent, and purchase the apartments. We took a sizable 10-year mortgage, with a monthly payment of 70,000 shekels. That puts pressure on us, it’s true, but we are happy with the decision. The move is economically correct and is critical for the yeshiva’s independence.”
In a conversation with TheMarker, Koka maintains that contrary to his statement in the video, these are private apartments that Amigour manages for the Jewish Agency, which do not belong to the Construction and Housing Ministry and are not part of the public housing stock of units. According to Koka, the yeshiva purchased more than 20 such apartments in the building from Amigour. He also confirms that the yeshiva has been renting 10 to 12 public housing apartments from Amidar for years. The justification for this, he says, is that the yeshiva also houses families that are engaged in other educational efforts, or social workers.
The hesder yeshiva also appears to have a connection in the local council, in the person of Eliya Winter, the town’s treasurer. According to the yeshiva’s financial reports from 2013, Winter made a loan of approximately a quarter of a million shekels available to it that year – when a municipal election was held, which brought about a political turnabout in the town. At that time, Winter was not yet employed in the municipality, but a year later, as the aide to Mayor Marom, Winter loaned the nonprofit 466,000 shekels. According to a complaint submitted to the state comptroller in 2017, Winter was directly connected with promoting an investment of 3 million shekels for renovating the yeshiva dorms in the public housing apartments; the complaint states that the loan was approved by the settler leader and (former) cabinet minister Uri Ariel.
Winter is not the only interesting name on the yeshiva’s list of lenders. Another is the Adar Foundation, which from 2015 to 2017 alone loaned the nonprofit about 5.1 million shekels. According to a 2016 investigative report by Haaretz, the foundation is under the control or management of a Jewish businessman of Argentine origin, Zeev (Diego) Marynberg, who has transferred tens of millions of shekels to right-wing movements and the settlement enterprise through the foundation. Another borrower was the Otzem premilitary academy, which is identified with the religious right and receives state funding.
Izhar Lax stated in response: “Amidar possesses no independent authority to allocate properties. That is the exclusive authority of the Construction and Housing Ministry, based on criteria set by the state. Throughout my entire tenure in Amidar, I did not engage in allocating apartments in any way, shape or form. Over the years, the Housing Ministry, based on its policy, decided to allocate – in return for rent that reflected market prices – apartments in the [country’s] periphery that had been empty and neglected for many years, to various public bodies, nonprofits and local governments. The payment received was earmarked entirely for public housing. There is not one public-housing unit today that has been given free of charge to the garin-torani groups. Furthermore, there is not one person in the periphery, including in Mitzpeh Ramon, Yeruham or Dimona, who is eligible for public housing according to the Housing Ministry’s criteria and has not received an apartment. This, in the light of the available stock of apartments in those places.”
An event of the Ramat Elyashiv Garin Torani, in Lod.
Shilo Adler
Roni Marom stated in response: “Mitzpeh Ramon is home to a community from the religious Zionist stream. The political strength of its members is identical to the strength of every other resident, and the contention that the political strength of these residents influences the character of Mitzpeh Ramon is groundless. The proof is that about a year ago a shopping center was built that operates on Shabbat, and also a civil cemetery. As for the gay pride parade, that public has no foothold with regard to the council’s policy, which I personally lead and dictate. Concerning public housing, not one apartment was allocated to any sort of nucleus group during my term in office. The numbers cited are totally baseless and include the dorms of the high-school yeshiva – which are apartments earmarked for demolition that were given temporarily to the yeshiva until it moves to its permanent building.”
In regard to Winter’s claims, Marom stated: “If those loans were made, it was his own personal money, and even if it had been done in his capacity as municipal treasurer, which is incorrect, there would still have been no problem. As for the allegation that he promoted the renovation project of the yeshiva’s dorms – that is fiction.”
The Construction and Housing Ministry stated in response: “In accordance with a government decision, which was in force in the ministry in the past but more recently has no longer been in force, in locales where the demand for public housing was low, the apartments were rented to public renters. The public housing properties that are rented to public renters are divided into two types: some that were returned or will be returned to the stock [of units] for occupants of public housing, and some that from the outset were earmarked for public use and cannot be used as apartments. In the past few years the Construction and Housing Ministry has been working to return the apartments to the stock of public housing, and at present fewer than 1,000 apartments are rented to public renters. This is a complex process, and in cases where the public renters are uncooperative, the ministry is aided by the Justice Ministry’s unit for civil enforcement in order to regain possession of the property.”
Entering secular schools
State support and funding are critical for the operation of all garin groups, including secular ones. In 2013 the government decided to budget 110 million shekels (about $31.8 million at the time) for mission-driven nucleus groups (not only those that are religion-oriented) for the period 2013-2015. In practice, as a 2014 investigation of the Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy revealed, and as is shown in a trenchant report issued by State Comptroller Shapira in 2017, most of these funds ended up in the hands of nonprofit organizations that are politically identified with the right-wing Tkuma and Habayit Hayehudi parties.
Shapira found that persons close to Uri Ariel, who as housing minister and afterward as agriculture minister worked to channel funds to Garin Torani groups, meddled in government ministries for that purpose. One of the great absurdities the findings turned up is that the state was using the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization to fund the establishment of Garin Torani groups in such well-to-do cities as Tel Aviv, Ramat Hasharon, Givatayim and Hod Hasharon, even though the funds were earmarked by a government decision to strengthen the country’s periphery. Five such groups operate in Tel Aviv, for example.
In 2020, the Agriculture Ministry funded religious garin groups to the tune of 45 million shekels; beginning in 2021, support for the Torah nucleus groups moved from this channel to the Settlement Affairs Ministry, which is held by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. In addition, tens of millions of shekels are diverted to the nucleus groups by the Education Ministry, as a result of budgetary stipulations to operate national educational groups of this sort and the growing role of Jewish-oriented education and culture. In 2020, the Education Ministry allocated about 75 million shekels for these purposes.
Lod.
Ofer Vaknin
In addition, over the years, Garin Torani groups have received funding from the Negev and Galilee Development Ministry and from the Construction and Housing Ministry. “It is very difficult to monitor the budgets that are transferred, because of the number of nonprofit organizations that each group has, and because the money comes from a range of government ministries and local governments,” says Dr. Sagi Elbaz, from the Secular Forum, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to supporting secular education. He estimates that overall, the Garin Torani groups receive 130-150 million shekels annually from the state and from local governments.
“A governmental budget is based on the allocation of funds for the benefit of ordinances of support,” adds Elbaz. “During the year, a minister is unable to estimate what type of budgeting requests will be received according to support stipulations. The minister receives requests and decides. If there is a political connection with the applicant, obviously they will be prioritized.”
A detailed report issued in March 2016 by Dina Zilber, who was at time deputy attorney general, contained a directive to eliminate cases of multiple support and to unify funding for Torah nucleus groups under one government body. The directive was made public following a request by Hiddush, a nonprofit group that advocates “religious freedom and equality.” However, more than five years on, the directive is yet to be implemented.
Along with financial aid, the nucleus groups benefit from public resources that are allocated by local governments for nonprofits in general, with recipients including community centers, synagogues or extracurricular day-care centers. In addition, Garin Torani groups enjoy free staffing, as women who opt for national service – an alternative to army service – can volunteer to work in them. Their presence is manifested primarily in the education system. This aspect of national service drew attention mainly because of the volunteers’ activity in secular cities of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Following a campaign by the Secular Forum a few years back, the number of religious nonprofits operating in the state-secular school system decreased. However, there are still places available in these schools for national service volunteer work via the Torah nucleus groups, as can be seen on the service’s website.
‘Imparting their shoddy values’
Garin Resheet, which operates in Ramat Hasharon, is the dominant Torah nucleus group in the secular cities. In recent years its activity has stirred a furor in the wake of allegations that it is trying to transform the city’s secular public character. Several years ago, one of the group’s founders, Netanel Siman-Tov, was recorded saying that the garin’s preparatory bar mitzvah lessons for secular boys in Ramat Hasharon constitute a tremendous unrealized potential. “It has to be hard for you to sleep at night, knowing that the boy you meet and pump up about tefillin, mitzvot [commandments] and everything else – that two months later it will all be over,” he said sardonically at an event for garin members.
Ramat Hasharon is also an example of how a determined stand by local residents can reduce the influence and clout of a Torah nucleus group. In the 2018 municipal election, a local party called Free Ramat Hasharon ran on a platform that included a plank explicitly calling to do battle against Garin Resheet. The party won five out of 17 seats and became a major force in the city council and a member of the coalition cobbled together by the mayor, Avi Gruber. Earlier this month the party’s flagship battle against the group’s hesder yeshiva – which for 11 years was housed illegally in a municipally-owned synagogue – ended. City Hall signed an agreement with the synagogue’s manager, under which the building would revert to possession of the city, which would examine the possibility of retrospectively validating the irregular construction there.
The synagogue in Ramat Hasharon.
The yeshiva had already left the premises in May and was operating in private homes. Under the new agreement, security measures will be installed to oversee activity at the site and prevent a renewed synagogue takeover. “This battle has ended,” the Free Ramat Hasharon Facebook page asserted, “but the campaign is not yet over. The ‘settlers in the hearts’ have not yet given up the idea of establishing an unneeded hesder yeshiva in Ramat Hasharon, one that preaches the exclusion of women, racism, hatred of LGBT people and evasion of full military service. The group, which receives abundant government funding, still aspires to impart to us its shoddy values against our will. As long as it’s up to us, we will not allow that.”
Garin Resheet is considered one of the strongest in the country, not least because over the years the various nongovernmental organizations connected with it have received millions of shekels in donations from the businessman Yitzchak Mirilashvili, the owner of the right-wing Channel 20, through his Meromim Foundation. The organizations then transfer funds among themselves.
One nonprofit that has received funds from the Meromim Foundation is Gevanim (known in English as Shades – Event Management Values). Ahead of the 2019 Knesset election, the firm funded the rental of a huge billboard for a Hardal group called Hazon (“Vision”) at the entrance to Jerusalem, which read: “Mom and Dad – family. The courage to be normal.” The billboard, which came under attack for its implicit condemnation of LGBT and single-parent families, was removed after a short time by the advertising firm.
Until a few years ago, Siman-Tov, one of the Garin Resheet founders, was on the board of directors of Channel 20. Another board member was Yisrael Zeira, one of the leaders of the Rosh Yehudi Garin Torani group in Tel Aviv and the CEO of real estate firm Be’emuna, which was involved in purchasing properties in Jaffa for a Garin Torani group there. Another person connected with Garin Resheet is Yair Cohen, the owner of a real estate company called Avney Derech, who was one of the first members of the Ramat Hasharon group. The company’s presenter in one of its marketing campaigns was the actor Oded Menashe, who for years has been close to Garin Resheet.
Two of Garin Resheet’s veteran members hold senior positions in Avney Derech. In addition, in 2019, Cohen personally donated 100,000 shekels to a nonprofit called Karov Lalev, which has ties to Resheet. The nonprofit also received 86,000 shekels from the Meromim Foundation that year. “There is a broad network of connections that provide assistance and exert influence not only in Ramat Hasharon but across the country,” says Idan Lamdan, a city council member in that city from Meretz. “They are closed circles that are extremely difficult to monitor.”
The hesder yeshiva and the Garin Torani in Ramat Hasharon stated in response: “The Resheet community is active in a range of spheres in Ramat Hasharon, with the cooperation and great desire of the residents. We strive to emphasize the common denominator we have as a Jewish people and create a bridge between worlds. Some in the city who view the unity of the Jewish people as something bad are operating against the community and its values, and live with a feeling of being persecuted [by people who] always want to change them. The community worked in full agreement with the municipality, until the latter recently revised its approach under pressure of those alien individuals.
“The Ramat Hasharon nucleus group operates through a nonprofit association which is supported by the government lawfully. With its support, the government sees a great blessing in the activity of the group’s families, which contribute of their time and energy toward the welfare, education, unity and acceptance of the Other in Ramat Hasharon. We invite the residents of Ramat Hasharon to get to know our activity close-up and not to be nourished by lies and vilifications.”
‘Agenda: Expulsion of Arabs’
The Torah nucleus group in Lod, a mixed city of some 77,000 people, of whom a little under one-third are Arabs, is also considered one of the country’s most influential; according to local estimates, there are about 1,000 families that identify with the garin. As in Acre, in Lod, too, the Garin Torani was involved in the establishment of a neighborhood earmarked exclusively for the religious public: Ramat Elyashiv. In the early 2000s, when the land was put on the market, the price per apartment was calculated to be 7 shekels – in other words, effectively free.
The land was obtained by one of the nonprofits of the Torah nucleus group, which was the only bidder to answer a call for bids that was earmarked for nonprofit groups. At the time, the whole area was neglected and run-down, and inhabited by a few Arab families who were classified as squatters. The Torah nucleus group negotiated with the families, who left after receiving compensation.
Close to Ramat Elyashiv is the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood, which had a Jewish majority in the past, but whose demographic structure was overturned following a massive departure of residents in the 1990s to nearby Modi’in and Shoham, resulting in the current an Arab majority. Many of the Arab residents were recent arrivals to Lod, among them Palestinian collaborators with the Shin Bet security service, and Bedouin from the Negev. Members of the Garin Torani arrived in the neighborhood about a decade ago and started to buy or rent apartments there. The underprivileged neighborhood, marked by poverty and crime, was the site of some of the most severe disturbances in May, with gun violence and cars being set on fire.
“It’s incredible to see the disparities in Ramat Eshkol in all the indices, but especially in education and value of real estate,” says Shmaryahu-Yeshurun. “On one side of the street are ramshackle buildings and across the road stand tall, clean, new structures. The nucleus group set up a branch in Ramat Eshkol in order to have an impact there, too. In my study, I asked one of the group’s leaders, ‘What do you think will happen when you enter a neighborhood that has an Arab majority? Where do you expect them to go?’ He replied, ‘We want to have a Jewish majority everywhere [in Lod], for there not to be a situation in which Arabs are the majority.'”
The Lod municipality hall and the state, working through the Urban Renewal Authority, are seeking to initiate a major project of new construction in Ramat Eshkol, in which decrepit buildings will be evacuated and high-rises with 5,000 apartments will go up in their place. Arab residents, however, are suspicious of the plan. “For years we lived in Lod quietly – Jews and Arabs. The municipality didn’t care about us then, either, but there was no segregation between the residents,” says Fuaz, a Lod resident who asked to be identified only by his first name. “The garin has a clear agenda: to expel the Arabs from the city. They’re talking about residential towers of 15 to 25 stories, but are ignoring the way the Arab public lives, and our wishes. The plan doesn’t even include a mosque or a school for the Arab public. It’s not for our benefit, but the opposite. The plan is to destroy the Arab presence in these neighborhoods and to move us out.
“In the meantime, members of the garin are offering the neighborhood’s residents high prices, above market rate, for their apartments. In the end people will take to the streets not because of Hamas and not because of Al-Aqsa, but because of years of frustration, because of how the municipality ignores us, the demolition of houses, the lack of planning, the lack of investment in our education and culture, the neglect of our neighborhoods. And all this while the garin is getting stronger and is fueling these feelings.”
Aharon Atias.
Old-time residents of Lod, Arabs and Jews alike, complain about the nucleus group’s close ties with the municipality, which translates into their holding position in it and the allocation of public structures such as synagogues and community centers. In large measure, they see the group and the municipality as a single entity. This stems in part from the fact that the municipality’s director general, Aharon Atias, a Lod native, was one of the first members of the Garin Torani – his activity in it dates back to the mid-1990s. A decade ago, he was also one of the first who moved into the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood. Another official identified with the garin is the city’s deputy mayor and holder of the education portfolio, Yossi Harush, also a Lod native.
The mayor, Yair Revivo, is perceived to be devoted to furthering the interests of the group. He has praised the garin several times in the media for developing and promoting Lod. “The Garin Torani influences the municipality,” says Fida Shahida, a city council member. “Atias is the effective founder of the group, and he is the one who brings [the municipality] the ideas.”
Atias maintains that public structures are allocated lawfully to the different population groups in the city, as are the public positions within the municipality. “Where’s the problem? If there are good people in the garin who are accepted to work in the municipality, why not choose them? In the renewal project, there is an Arab employee named Said who is doing wonderful work together with the folks from the nucleus group. Why turn white into black? If an Arabic school is needed in the new neighborhood, it will be built. There is already a mosque there today.
“I’m glad that my friends are coming to live in Lod. Did anyone consider telling the residents of [Lod neighborhood] Ganei Aviv, ‘Why did you come from the Soviet Union to settle among us?’ But when it comes to the religious public, you’re allowed to ask. There is no intention of pushing anyone out of this city. They are all citizens of Lod, we love them and we are happy to serve them all. If the garin wants to live in particular places, we will not push them out, and the same goes for the Arabs who are trying to live in Jewish neighborhoods.”
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