Holy Exposures Commentary and Photos of Israel

Abutbul Running for Bet Shemesh Mayor

Moshe Abutbul is the Sha”s candidate for Mayor of Bet Shemesh.  In the final day before the elections, RBS residents have gotten a steady flow of mail box goodies from Abutbul’s camp.  Surprisingly, we’ve seen little from Vaknin or Lerner in the last day.

Today’s Abutbul flyer makes the case for the Anglo RBS community in English with prominent members of our community who have come out in support of this candidate.

This flyer claims that Abutbul is good for RBS and that he speaks for all residents here.  Notice, however, that the sampling of voices chosen to support him also speak volumes of who he is.

1. No women here.

2. All Anglo Haredim.  We don’t see any kippot srugot here.

3. No mention of what party he represents.  You would think from this flyer that Abutbul is running as an independent.

Following up on yesterday’s post, to the credit (sic!) of the perpetrators of yesterday’s mess, by this morning, most if not all of them were cleaned up.

However, not to be undersold, today’s leaflet shows that the old bard still has some fight left in him!

Well, I’m impressed that at least this time someone is fessing up to having distributed this.  (We cannot assume however, that Vaknin’s campaign actually did send this - politics is a strange business).  Likewise, I find it interesting that the pashkevilas have switched to English. Is that not a true ’sign of the times’?

Vaknin Supporters Have Switched to English

Believe it or not, another five years has passed, and it’s time once again to elect a mayor in Bet Shemesh. The elections are set for November. Suprisingly, the current 3-time elected mayor, Danny Vaknin, has not been out on the town.

Having arrived in Bet Shemesh in 1994, a year after Vaknin had won the election from Fadida, I’ve only experienced two elections since, in 1998 and in 2003. In the past elections, there had been a whole series of parlour meetings, campaign stops, questions and answers sessions, and generally good-old politicking beginning many months before the elections.

We are now in September, less than two months away from election day on November 11. This time around, the candidates have only been out on the campaign for a few weeks. I know of four candidates. There may even be more.

The incumbent Danny Vaknin runs for Likud. Natan Sheetrit runs for Moledet, Shalom Lerner for the national religious camp (Mafda”l), and Moshe Abutbul for Sha”s.

I was driving today through the Givat Sharet and Ramat Bet Shemesh sections of Bet Shemesh. I noticed a whole bunch of mayoral election banners, mostly for Shalom Lerner, and more interestingly, none for the incumbent Mayor Danny Vaknin.

Here’s a gallery of some of the banners out there so far. If the election was decided by number of banners, then Shalom Lerner would be leading by a landslide.