Local Politics and Knesset Election Results
The Mayor of the city, Moshe Abutbul, is a member of Shas, the deputy-mayor Shmuel Greenberg of United Torah Judaism (UTJ). Haaretz quotes Abutbul as saying: "Beit Shemesh is not a Haredi city and will not be one." In the 2009 elections, Shas and UTJ won nine seats in the 21-seat municipal council, one seat went to a new Haredi party called Tov.
Formerly a Likud stronghold, in the 2006 Knesset elections United Torah Judaism became the city's strongest party, with 22.2 percent of the votes and Shas getting 19.9 percent. In 2009 Likud regained its primacy, obtaining 22.2 percent of the votes, and Shas also gained, garnering 20.9 percent, with United Torah Judaism a close third at 20.6 percent. Eda Haredit boycott the elections.
The Chief Rabbi of Beit Shemesh is Shimon Bitton.
Read more about this topic: Beit Shemesh
Famous quotes containing the words local, politics, election and/or results:
“To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self- congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.”
—Clifford Geertz (b. 1926)
“The newspaper reader says: this party is destroying itself through such mistakes. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it has lost its instinctive sureness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, “Where is the best place to go to?” He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages—heaven for climate, and hell for society.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one’s memory, and makes one feel one’s love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.”
—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)