BREAKING NEWS

Shas supporters pressure Deri to recant, re-assume leadership of party

Loyalists of Shas leader Arye Deri began a countdown Wednesday night at the tent they erected outside his home in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.
Unlike much of the world, they were not counting down to the new year. Most were not even aware that 2014 was ending.
They were counting down to 7:30 p.m. Thursday night when Deri’s resignation letter from the Knesset that he submitted Tuesday night takes effect. They said their initial goal was persuading him to backtrack by then, but if they do not succeed, they still have a month until the January 29 deadline to submit Shas’s Knesset list.
“I hope that we will succeed in our mission of stopping Arye Deri from taking a disastrous step that would take years for Shas to fix,” veteran Deri loyalist Rabbi Yehuda Azrad said at the tent. “Hundreds of people have been coming here to say we want the Shas revolution to continue.”