Q&A: Baruch Almakayes and Civil Disobedience in Your Organization
Baruch Almakayes and Civil Disobedience in Your Organization
Question
While browsing the internet for articles from the disengagement period, I came across a Haaretz article about Baruch Almakayes (former head of the Yeruham local council), and to my surprise I saw your name featured in the article in a pretty significant context. This is what it said: "At the height of the crisis, in March of that year, Rabbi Michael (Michi) Abraham, who taught at the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham, published an unusual notice in the town's local paper. Under the headline 'The Silence of the Lambs,' Abraham called for a kind of civil disobedience against Almakayes. The council is not functioning, it said, public funds are disappearing, and the residents are staying silent. Abraham asked residents to sign a petition for Almakayes's removal from office and even threatened that at the next stage he would 'declare a property-tax revolt.'
The notice received an impressive response. About 900 Yeruham residents signed it. After that, the protest headquarters, which called itself 'Baruch Is Guilty,' urged residents to boycott the town's Independence Day events. 'There is no struggle without a price,' the notice published by the protest headquarters said. 'We will not let Almakayes destroy the town, and we will not cooperate with him in any area.'
Could you explain how things developed and what exactly happened there with this Baruch Almakayes?
Answer
You’re reminding me of forgotten things—and painful ones.
The council head at the time, Baruch Almakayes, was elected again (he had already served as council head in the past) and started going wild—acting illegally, arbitrarily, violently, and with threats—and everyone stayed silent (the lambs). Anonymous letters were passed around through other places so the sender wouldn’t be identified. The town was truly deteriorating into ruin. I saw that this was the situation and decided to put the gun on the table in order to throw him out of there. A long struggle began that lasted over a year, with Almakayes receiving close cooperation from the Haredim in the town (of course), which naturally was the community I belonged to. He also got strong backing from the government (Labor, Interior Minister Ophir Pines, Peres, Dalia Itzik, and others), who refused to touch him despite clear and unequivocal evidence we brought them of criminal conduct (and also submitted to the police). He was important to them because he was the only person from the development towns who supported that collection of Ashkenazim.
The media, the government, and the police all completely ignored unmistakable, ongoing violent criminal behavior backed by solid evidence. In the end, we managed to get a TV reporter to come and do a piece on the situation. The report was supposed to be aired on the television news. There was heavy pressure from the government not to broadcast it (that’s what the reporter told us). After several days of pressure, they finally decided to air it anyway, and on that same broadcast Interior Minister Ophir Pines announced that he had fired Almakayes. That was after, of course, giving him full and constant backing the whole time. He fired him live on air without even informing him beforehand. What won’t people do to look good on television.
The whole story, both local and national, was astonishing, and I learned a great deal from it, but this isn’t the place. I could write a thick book about it. That too I probably won’t do.
Discussion on Answer
And despite the connection I had and despite how unequivocal the situation was, you can see how much Haaretz is willing to give favorable coverage to struggles by “settlers.”
Rumor has it that local government is considered one of the more corrupt sectors.
Did you support the disengagement at the time? Why? And how does it make sense for a council head to talk like a mafia boss? So did he mean he was going to throw the hesder yeshiva people out of Yeruham?
"I’m not planning to throw them out. I’m planning to tell them: you cut off half of my Yeruham, which is registered in my name in the land registry? Give it back to me. My father told me: whoever does you harm, don’t repay him with good; and whoever is merciful to the cruel will in the end be cruel to the merciful. And Rabbi Blumentzweig (Eliyahu Blumentzweig, head of the hesder yeshiva) and Michi Abraham need to know: if you don’t want me, then sit down and persuade people, and in another three years there will be elections and you can topple me. Go to the Israel Police, file complaints against me. That’s fine, I have a small hand, suitable for handcuffs. But if you think that every morning you’re going to stand against me like settlers—I won’t have mercy on you, and within the framework of the law and proper administration I’ll remove you one by one, with a truck, and applaud from behind."
What do you want from Rabbi Blumentzweig, what do you want from the hesder yeshiva people?
"I’ll come and say to the rabbi: let’s see how the hesder yeshiva can turn from a minus into a plus. Let’s take ten of your people and help the drug addicts, the young Russian women who are going around with the Bedouin, get the whole town out of this mud. But right now I’m ashamed to return to Yeruham, to those orange people. All my fences are full of orange, Shiites. On Passover, Rabbi Blumentzweig sent Passover charity food packages to Dimona instead of to people they know here. I came and said to him: may you burn in hell. I can’t understand it, I can’t live with it. If there was one good thing in Yeruham, it was the moderation, the easygoing spirit. Now you go through there, it’s like Hamdan. But in another half year I’ll come and tell them: all of you come out of your holes, with all the M-16s you stole to help Gush Katif. Because I have only one source of strength—my public."
Rabbi Blumentzweig is one of the nicest and most decent people I know—how can someone talk to him like that? By the way, the Haredi community in Yeruham—does that mean the people who studied in the Lithuanian yeshiva that Rabbi Tikochinsky of blessed memory established there?
aaa, that’s such a general statement that I assume even you yourself don’t know how to explain or substantiate it.
Yishai, I didn’t support the disengagement, but I also didn’t oppose it. I argued then, and I also wrote this on the site, that supporting or opposing the disengagement is foolish, because it doesn’t stand on its own. In order to form a position on it, you need to hear what the policy is regarding every possible outcome afterward. And the same goes for many issues over which heated and meaningless arguments are waged.
It seems to me that you didn’t read the article carefully. That immortal quote is Almakayes’s, not mine. I’m offended by the very possibility of attributing it to me. I share your opinion regarding Rabbi Blumentzweig, and even more so.
There were also such people, and others as well.
Fine. According to this article, everything is clear. The real big problem was the religious settlement in Yeruham. That’s just the mentality of the residents, and that’s who they wanted. The religious residents should simply have left (after all, they hadn’t bought apartments there). There was no need to save anyone, and no one needed saving. And no one was in danger. This Almakayes is corrupt in Ashkenazi terms and in the terms of the residents who came there temporarily in order to save them and along the way improve their own financial situation before moving somewhere else—but not in the terms of the original and real local residents, who don’t seem to have been bothered by his actions and conduct. Outside intervention by force was mistaken (even if not unjustified in itself), at least over the long term. The original residents (and the “real” ones, according to the article) should have learned from direct experience the consequences of their choice.
By the way, that article you saw, by Meron Rapoport in Haaretz, we obtained only after a lot of effort because I had a connection with that reporter. It was the first tiny bit of attention we got from the national media, whereas much smaller things done in big cities (and therefore usually less harmful, because the systems there are larger and more balanced) would get entire news editions devoted to them.
https://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/2005-05-24/ty-article/0000017f-dbed-df9c-a17f-fffdb9e10000