Last week, I reported that United Torah Judaism Chairman and Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transportation Minister Miri Regev (Likud), demanding that the works being conducted on the railroad over the weekend be canceled (Goldknopf Ushering the Next Big Crisis over Train Works that Can Only Be Done on Shabbat).
On Monday morning, Kan 11 news reported that Goldknopf’s partners at UTJ are unhappy with his move. The news outlet cited Gafni’s people in UTJ (the Lithuanians) who said that “this is a mistake since any public attempt to deal with issues related to Shabbat causes the general public to be angry with the Haredi parties and this leads to incitement against them.”
Shas officials also criticized the chairman of UTJ who hails from the Hasidic faction of Agudat Israel, saying that “this should have been discussed in-camera and handled quietly and behind the scenes.”
Had Israel Railways obeyed Goldknopf’s decree against works on Shabbat, it would have had to suspend service on weekdays, since the electrifying of the rails cannot be done only at night. The result would have been an increase in traffic jams that would make––to name but one problem––ambulance response slower, placing human lives at risk. Now, if that doesn’t qualify as pikuach nefesh (desecrating Shabbat for the sake of saving a life), I don’t know what does.
But the Lithuanians in UTJ were doubly upset with the Hasidic chairman because he put them in a spot where they couldn’t publicly support desecrating Shabbat and so they had to go along, against their best judgment.
One shouldn’t go into politics unless one is prepared to betray all his principles and sell his grandmother in the same deal.
Transport Minister Miri Regev (Likud) responded to Goldknopf’s demand by announcing that she would give it the most serious consideration and make the strongest effort to comply by eliminating the works that were not crucial at the pikuach nefesh level – which, in practice, meant nothing was going to change.
Likud members have called on their Haredi coalition partners to “work together on finding appropriate solutions,” which also means absolutely nothing is going to change.
