Word: agudat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Peres is also pursuing alliances with several tiny religious parties in the hope of achieving a Knesset majority without Likud's help. Peres is especially lobbying the ultraorthodox Agudat Yisrael (two seats) and the National Religious Party (four seats), a mainstream Orthodox group that is holding out for the Ministries of Religious Affairs, Education and Interior. Yet the National Religious Party complicated Peres' task last week by announcing that it would join only a wider coalition that included Likud...
Orthodox rabbis already have wide civil powers. They approve all marriages, divorces and adoptions. Their political clout, moreover, grew during the Begin years. In order to win the support of Agudat Yisrael, the religious party that had four sometimes crucial seats in the Knesset, Begin made several concessions. He forbade El Al flights on the Sabbath, losing an estimated $30 million a year, and pushed through a law limiting autopsies, which violate Orthodox beliefs. Begin also agreed to push the highly controversial "Who is a Jew?" legislation, which would amend Israeli law to ensure that the only converts granted citizenship...
Political analysts were divided over just what had happened. There was some speculation among Knesset members that the defectors might have come from two tiny parties in the coalition, the ultrareligious Agudat Yisrael and Tami, an ethnic party of Sephardic Jews. Another explanation might be that some members simply preferred a man of Herzog's stature. Said Labor Leader Shimon Peres: "We were wise enough to present the best candidate...
With that, the dispute was instantly transformed into a red-hot political issue-potentially the first threat to the coalition that Begin stitched together last month out of his conservative Likud bloc and three small religious parties. Since one of them is Agudat Israel, its support is crucial if the Begin coalition is to maintain its razor-thin, one-vote majority in the 120-member Knesset...
...there was little cause for jest. The religious parties quickly showed their clout when vacationing Knesset members were summoned for a special session to discuss the legal issues raised by the disputed project. Members of Agudat Israel and some Deputies from the more moderate National Religious Party have argued that the archaeologists, who have a government license to excavate for relics of King David's 11th century B.C. biblical city, are actually disturbing the graves of a 700-year-old cemetery, thus violating religious...