Meet Fresh Faces of Knesset as Israel Election Sparks Parliament Shake-Up

Women, Orthodox, and Ethiopians Make Debuts in Chamber

By JTA

Tel Aviv — Last week’s Israeli election saw a major shakeup in the country’s government, with 53 new members elected to its parliament, the Knesset.

Some already have received wide attention, including Yair Lapid, the middle class-focused chairman of Yesh Atid; Naftali Bennett, the high-tech entrepreneur who chairs the new Jewish Home party; technocrat Yair Shamir, Yisrael Beiteinu’s No. 2; and Moshe Feiglin, the nationalist settler who finally landed a Knesset seat with the ruling Likud Party.

Though lesser known, many of the other new faces in the Knesset are no less interesting. Meet five of them: a woman with a doctorate in Talmud, an Ethiopian immigrant, a mother of 11 from Hebron, a socially conscious venture capitalist and an American-born rabbi.

Rabbi Dov Lipman (Yesh Atid)

He’s a haredi Orthodox rabbi in a party calling for haredi army service. He’s been an advocate for coexistence in a city fraught with interreligious conflict. Soon he’ll be the first American-born member of Israel’s Knesset since Meir Kahane.

Dov Lipman, 41, originally from Silver Spring, Md., was a Jewish educator in Cincinnati and Maryland before moving to Israel with his family in 2004. They ended up in Beit Shemesh, a Jerusalem suburb with a large haredi and Anglophone population that also has been a flashpoint for conflict between haredi and Modern Orthodox Israelis. As the city’s conflicts escalated in recent years, Lipman tried to serve as a bridge between the two sides.

He says he believes that there’s no contradiction between working, serving the country and being haredi, and he wants to bring that ethic to Israel. It’s a challenge: Many of Israel’s haredim are unemployed, few serve in the Israeli military and many are avowedly non-Zionist.

“In America, haredim have education, there are opportunities and they work,” Lipman told JTA. “That issue bothers us more because we know there’s no contradiction.”