A group of secular and religious residents is hoping to represent the non-haredi sector in City Hall.
By DAVID STROMBERGnew jerusalemites 224 88(photo credit: Courtesy)
Many Jerusalem residents, especially those who live in the city center, have become increasingly disillusioned by the way the municipality has managed and mismanaged the city's development over the last five years. But not all of them have thrown up their arms in defeat.
A group of non-haredi residents - religious and secular - have banded together and created a new political group, Yerushalmim, in the hope of improving quality of life in the capital by earning seats on the next city council.
Difficulties in almost every part of modern life - employment, housing, education, culture, transportation - have driven many young people and new families to suburban cities. Those who stay have to fight tooth and nail to do so, struggling at every step of establishing what they consider a normal life.
The mayor's perceived inability to address the mounting frustrations of the city's non-haredi residents, which includes both secular and religious people, has led to political awareness and union among this mixed population to oppose what they feel are purely haredi interests.
"There's no representation for religious and secular people," says Rachel Azaria Fraenkel, a longtime activist and organizer, and one of the six members running for city council on the Yerushalmim ballot, which also includes Lili Weil, Simha Tzadok Peled, Jean-Marc Liling, Todd Warnick and Gilad Mor. "The haredim can't see past their noses'. The people who are suffering, the non-haredim, have become their own group."
Yerushalmim hopes to represent that group in the next city council. They have been preparing their party for about a year and have opened an office in the city center. The initial list of 70 volunteers has grown into the hundreds.
"In asking the public for their support and trust, it was important for us to do the work behind the scenes," says Azaria Fraenkel. "We had to make sure we had an organized agenda, financial support, volunteers. We built it in such a way that we are going into city council. We did research to see whether there was a need for a group like us, whether people would vote and found there was a great need.
The group's volunteers have been spending two hours each Friday standing on the streets of Baka, Talpiot, the Germany Colony and other central neighborhoods handing out flyers and introducing Yerushalmim to the public. There are also volunteers working to spread the word in outlying neighborhoods including Ramot, Gilo and Kiryat Hayovel.
"I was raised in [the religious Zionist movement of] Bnei Akiva," says Azaria Fraenkel, who has been part of assorted campaigns including for the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem express train, against the Ashkelon coal power plant and constructing tall buildings along Israel's beachfront, and passing the Clean Air Act. "As part of my education, we [religious Zionists] discussed whether we were more like the haredim or the secular people, and we learned that we took the best from both."
She laments that over the last few years this position has shifted, with some religious Zionists aligning with haredim. "During the Bridge of Strings incident [where young dancers performing at the bridge's opening were ordered by haredi Deputy Mayor Yehoshua Pollack to wear more modest costumes], one of the National Religious Party members said, 'This is a religious and haredi city.' But I have no problem living next to a secular person and I don't want my vote being used to support the haredi position."
"This antagonism [among the city's different populations] is not good for people's lives," says Weil, who has founded and directed numerous social organizations over the last 43 years, most recently the Yad Rachel Educational and Therapeutic Centers, whose 12 offices throughout Israel serve about 1,200 children, from Arab families to evacuees of Gush Katif. "People become very sour."
"We're clear among ourselves that we're not anti-haredi," says Liling, a lawyer who has worked at the Justice Ministry, and who now works with asylum seekers at the UN. "They [haredim] have interests here, too. But the balance has been broken, and other residents are feeling like it's difficult for them to live here."
An example of that upset balance, says Yerushalmim, is the take-over of state schools by haredim, one result of which has been the growth of public school class size to 30, while classes at some haredi schools average 13.
Warnick, a retired basketball referee who worked with the National Israeli League for 25 years, takes a tougher stance. "It's all part of the insidious haredi plan to take over the whole city," he says. "I've been in Israel for 29 years, I'm a veteran with a different point of view and I see our friends' grown-up children leaving Jerusalem. The parents follow after them to be with the grandchildren."
Warnick is flabbergasted by the continual delays to the multi-purpose arena that was supposed to have been built near Teddy Stadium. He blames the delays on the current mayor and his coalition.
"The national basketball team can't play a game in the country's own capital," he says. "Even Shas holds its major conventions in Tel Aviv's Yad Eliyahu Stadium."
"We see that there are a lot of people in different fields working on the same issues," says Peled, referring to protests in Baka, where area residents along with representatives from various political and community groups voiced their opposition to new traffic patterns for the neighborhood. "We want to bring together all these efforts to get the establishment to work for our cause."
Peled, director of Mindset, a PR and strategic consulting firm that specializes in servicing non-profit organizations, says that at the moment, "everything we want or need, we have to get through conflict. We have to fight the municipality, but we want to combine forces and be on the inside, so that we can work for the residents."
"Everyone on the list has worked in some way for the benefit of society and Jerusalem, and Yerushalmim is just the next step," she adds. "We realized that the only way to affect what's happening is to get into city council."
Azaria Fraenkel has quit her job and dipped into her savings to do just that. "Most people don't know that it's an unpaid position," she says.
In the upcoming election, each resident votes with two tickets - one for mayor and another for a candidate list. While Yerushalmim admits that unless a party is part of the ruling coalition it's very difficult to wield any power, the group is calling itself the Jerusalemite's "insurance policy" regardless of which mayoral candidate wins the election.
"Compared to lists from this and even past elections," says Liling, "we're present on the ground - in the streets - in a way that's stronger than I've seen before. There are other lists that focus on specific problems or groups, but sometimes at the detriment of other problems. We're already passionate about what we do in our various sectors, which together make up the strengths of the city."
For more information about the group visit: www.yerushalmim.org
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