Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Yair Netanyahu’s Norwegian Girlfriend Spurs ‘Woe Is Us’ From Orthodox

The leader of the haredi Shas Party said that the relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son and a non-Jewish Norwegian woman is a matter of national concern.

Yair Netanyahu, 23, is dating Sandra Leikanger, 25, a woman he met while they were both studying at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Netanyahu reportedly chatted with Norway’s prime minister about his son’s relationship at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

“Woe is us if it is true,” Shas Party Chairman Aryeh Deri told the haredi Orthodox radio station Kol Barama on Monday. He added that if the reports of the relationship are true, then the prime minister and his wife “have a great heartache.”

Deri explained that he is not attacking the prime minister over his son’s choice of a girlfriend. Rather, he said, “I try not to raise personal criticism, but if, heaven forbid, this is true, it is no longer a personal matter – it is a symbol of the Jewish people.”

He said he is also concerned about how the relationship would appear to his friends “who invest tens of millions, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation throughout the world.”

Other Shas Party members and members of other parties, including Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, have criticized the relationship.

Bentzi Gopshtain, head of the Lehava organization, which is dedicated to fighting assimilation in Israel, warned Netanyahu that his grandchildren from that pairing would not be Jewish. He called on Netanyahu “to prevent this relationship.”

Binyamin Lipkin, editor of haredi newspaper Hamevaser, criticized Netanyahu in an Op-Ed published in Ynet.

“If the prime minister constantly waves his ultimate demand that the Palestinians recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state, it is not in line with that same prime minister’s indecent bragging about his son’s relationship with a gentile. If this relationship leads to marriage, it will serve as a de facto declaration from the highest official in Israel that Israel is a state of all citizens and not a Jewish state,” Lipkin wrote.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.