Rabbi Tzuriel Krispel, 66, is one of the founders of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Over the years, he held key positions in the movement, helped establish it in various cities, served as deputy mayor of the central city of Elad and ran the Otzar Haim educational institutions in Beersheba. For a time, Krispel also served as the personal secretary of the party’s late spiritual founder, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

Krispel is what you might call an old-school Shasnik: Sephardi, Zionist, moderate in his views, and fully supportive of military service for anyone who is not studying in a yeshiva from morning to night. He himself served in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, Battalion 13, Company B, alongside Gadi Eisenkot, who was serving at the time in another company within the same combat battalion.

It is therefore not surprising that Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, offered Krispel a place on the Knesset slate of his new centrist Yashar! party.

“They offered me a place on the slate as an ultra-Orthodox, a former Golani soldier, a Shas man, and a rabbi in Israel,” Krispel told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “Eisenkot is fine, but the guys around him are a little anti-Haredi. I sat down with a woman at headquarters who manages ties with the ultra-Orthodox frameworks in the army. It was a good meeting, but it doesn’t sit well with the atmosphere there. That’s not my natural environment.”

Asked whether he foresaw actual Shas supporters voting for Eisenkot, Krispel firmly dismissed the notion.

“That’s not happening,” he said. “Someone who cares about the Torah world isn’t going to leave Shas that quickly.”

Krispel remains loyal to Shas and does not want to cause it harm, but the picture on the ground tells a different story. Shas is bleeding tens of thousands of votes – to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit, to the Likud and also to Eisenkot’s Yashar!

Shas, which won 11 seats in the last election, was polling at just seven seats in several recent pre-election surveys.

The main driver behind this slide is the ongoing political crisis over drafting ultra-Orthodox men, which is sending the Haredi parties into a panic ahead of the election. This is especially true for Shas, a complex party that is, for now, paying the heaviest political price for its hardline stance against military service. The dramatic internal developments in Shas over recent days fit squarely into this deep-seated fear of a mass voter exodus.

On Thursday, Shas chairman Aryeh Deri surrendered unconditionally to Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, with whom he had waged a bitter power struggle for years.

Deri went directly to the........

© The Times of Israel