Daughter of Shas founder and spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Adina Bar-Shalom, declares that if it was up to her, Shas would disappear; ‘Deri changed for the worse since leaving prison, he disappointed me,’ she laments.
The daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom declared Sunday that as far as she was concerned, the movement her father founded, Shas, can disappear. At the annual conference for graduates of the Gesher Institute, Bar-Shalom revealed that she is a member of a group consisting of members of a large spectrum of Israeli society who want to form a new political party.
“Deri changed considerably since he went to prison,” she agonized regarding the head of Shas and the man who created the women’s chapter of the movement during the 2015 elections. “He used to know how to mediate and connect between worlds, a capable man. A pity he went to prison and was entirely ruined.”
The interviewer, journalist Ayala Hasson, asked her if she thought Shas was history. Bar-Shalom responded: “If it was up to me, then yes.”
‘Picking on Haredim’
Bar-Shalom, an Israel Prize laureate, commented on the new political movement she is establishing and said, “The party includes Haredim, secular, and religious Jews and has formulated a set of mutual values, no small matter.” That said, she clarified, “I do not wish to be a Knesset member, but rather one of the founding fathers.”
Regarding the closing of the groundbreaking Haredi college she founded, she expressed deep disappointment that the chairman of Shas did not try to assist. “I am very hurt,” she said. “It is a terrible blow… As interior minister I believe he could have done a lot, had he wished.”
She also expressed concern over religious and secular relations sating, “The matter of attacking Haredim takes me to an unpleasant place, like pulling the beards of Jews in the Holocaust.”
As reported by Ynetnews