Eli Yishai

Yishai was born in Jerusalem on December 26, 1962, the second of seven children of parents who had immigrated to Israel from Tunisia.[1] He studied at the Hurvah and Porat Yosef yeshivas in Jerusalem and at Yeshivat HaNegev in Netivot.[5] His education preceded military service and employment in a skilled manual trade before he entered municipal and party politics.[5]

Yishai served in the Israel Defense Forces, initially as a tank crewman and later as a religious affairs noncommissioned officer in a transport unit.[5] Following his military service, he studied metalworking and worked as a welder and metalworker in a garage.[5] A 2005 biographical profile described him as married with five children.[6]

Yishai began his political work in 1984 as an aide to Nissim Ze’ev, a Shas representative on the Jerusalem City Council.[5] He subsequently served on the council himself from 1987 to 1988, establishing his first elected public role at the municipal level.[1][5] In 1988, he became an aide to Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and remained in that position until 1990.[5]

From 1990 through 1996, Yishai served as Shas secretary-general and headed the party’s municipal department.[5] He also directed the party’s El Hama’ayan educational network during the mid-1990s, before entering the Knesset.[5][6] His organizational responsibilities therefore included the party’s central administration, its municipal work, and an educational institution associated with it.[5]

Shas’s municipal organization operated in a political setting in which the Interior Ministry had substantial importance for local authorities because of its role in allocating national funds to them.[7] The ministry’s financial relationship with municipalities was linked to the development of Shas’s local power base during the 1980s.[7] Yishai’s early work as a municipal representative, ministerial aide, and party administrator preceded his own later appointments to that ministry.[5]

First elected to the Knesset on the Shas ticket in 1996, Yishai became minister of labor and social welfare in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.[1] He continued in the labor and welfare portfolio under Ehud Barak, serving through 2000.[1][6] At his first appointment, he was the second-youngest cabinet minister in Israeli history.[6]

Yishai succeeded Aryeh Deri as Shas chairman following Deri’s departure from political life after his conviction on corruption charges.[6] Shas won a record 17 seats in the 1999 election, when Yishai was identified as its political leader.[8] He subsequently led the party out of the government in July 2000 over the Camp David summit.[5]

In March 2001, Yishai became deputy prime minister and interior minister in Ariel Sharon’s first government, holding the interior portfolio until February 2003.[1] This appointment followed his earlier service as Deri’s aide in the ministry and his subsequent work directing Shas’s municipal department.[5] His parliamentary activities also included service on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the committee responsible for appointing rabbinical judges.[9]

In 2003, the Knesset selected Yishai as one of its representatives on the Commission for the Appointment of Religious Court Judges; a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs account reports that he said he would support candidates recommended by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.[10] That commentary portrays Yishai as a follower of Yosef and distinguishes his political leadership of Shas from Yosef’s spiritual leadership of the Sephardi Haredi party.[10]

When Sharon formed a government without the ultra-Orthodox parties in 2003, Yishai accused him of heading an “Ashkenazic and elitist” government.[11] His criticism accompanied a dispute over the exclusion of those parties from the coalition and the political place of ultra-Orthodox interests within the new government.[11]

Yishai led Shas to 12 Knesset seats in the 2006 election and became deputy prime minister and minister of industry, trade and labor in May that year.[1][5] He held the ministerial portfolio until 2009 and continued as deputy prime minister until 2013.[1] During his service at the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry, he replaced the Mahalav employment program with the Lights to Employment program and established the Fair Trade Authority.[5]

During the 2008 coalition period, Yishai made the status of Jerusalem a condition of Shas’s continued participation in government.[2] He said that Shas would leave if Jerusalem became a subject of negotiations, and on January 22 reportedly warned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the party would not remain if concessions were made on the city.[2] Olmert promised to keep Shas informed about the negotiations.[2]

Welfare expenditure was another central subject of Yishai’s coalition bargaining.[2] He said that Shas would quit the government unless child welfare payments were increased, and he held up government appointments until the issue was addressed.[2] During the effort to form a government later in 2008, Shas demanded a large increase in child allowances and assurances that Jerusalem would not be negotiated with the Palestinians.[2] Tzipi Livni rejected those conditions and was unable to form a government.[2]

On January 10, 2008, Yishai gave visiting U.S. President George W. Bush letters from Jonathan Pollard’s wife and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef appealing for Pollard’s release.[2] A White House spokesman responded that there were no plans to change Pollard’s status.[2] The episode placed Yishai in a direct role conveying an appeal from both Pollard’s family and Shas’s spiritual leader to the American president.[2]

After the 2009 election, Shas reached a coalition agreement with Netanyahu’s Likud, bringing Netanyahu closer to a Knesset majority.[12] Yishai supported participation in a broad government, saying that Israel faced challenges “both social and economic and on the diplomatic and security front” and that it was therefore right to combine forces.[12] Under the agreement, he remained deputy prime minister and returned to the Interior Ministry after serving as minister of industry, trade and labor.[13] The agreement also maintained the independence of the Haredi school system.[13]

Cabinet tables in 2010 and 2012 identified Yishai as Shas’s deputy prime minister and minister of the interior.[14][15] Shas’s stated priorities during this period included greater funding for social welfare and education, alongside opposition to dividing Jerusalem by ceding its eastern part for a Palestinian capital.[15] Those were party positions, while Yishai’s own coalition demands specifically addressed child allowances and negotiations concerning Jerusalem.[2][15]

As interior minister, Yishai was among seven ministers who met in Netanyahu’s office as an inner political circle.[7] His ministry also retained the practical influence associated with distributing national allocations to local governments, a responsibility of particular importance to mayors.[7] These cabinet and administrative roles accompanied his continuing leadership of Shas.[7]

For the January 2013 election, Shas adopted a three-person leadership arrangement comprising Aryeh Deri, Yishai, and Ariel Atias.[16] Yishai stood first on the party’s candidate list, with Deri second, and Shas won 11 seats.[17] The shared arrangement followed tensions surrounding Deri’s return to politics: Yishai had established himself as chairman and declined to surrender the position.[16]

The three-person leadership arrangement did not endure, and the party’s spiritual leadership subsequently gave Deri control.[16] In May 2013, Deri became Shas chairman, after which relations between the two politicians deteriorated.[5] Yishai left Shas in December 2014 after about 14 years at the party’s helm.[16][18]

On December 15, 2014, Yishai established a new party presented publicly as Ha’am Itanu, meaning “The Nation Is With Us,” and initially registered as Maran.[3][19] At its launch, he said that leaving Shas after 30 years “was not easy.”[19] He presented the new organization as a vehicle for continuing Yosef’s legacy and bridging divisions between religious and secular Israelis and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.[19]

Jewish Home Knesset member Yoni Chetboun announced plans to join the new party immediately after its launch.[3] The launch itself was disrupted by activists who shouted “traitor” at Yishai and scuffled with his supporters.[3] Deri condemned the violence and denied that the activists were affiliated with Shas.[19]

The new party, subsequently associated with the Yachad name, sought an electorate beyond Shas’s traditional supporters.[18] Its strategy included attracting voters disappointed with the established Haredi parties and later those dissatisfied with Bayit Yehudi.[18] For the 2015 election, it formed an alliance with Otzma Yehudit, whose Baruch Marzel appeared on the joint list.[18]

Yachad’s joint run with Otzma Yehudit in the March 2015 election did not produce any Knesset seats.[4] An election-results table gives the list 125,158 votes, approximately 3.0 percent of valid votes, and zero representatives.[20] Contemporary reporting placed its share at 2.97 percent, below the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, leaving it more than 10,000 votes short of entering the Knesset.[21]

Following the defeat, Yishai alleged that organized election fraud had deprived the party of votes and said that he was considering a court petition.[22] He nevertheless said that he did not regret leaving Shas and intended to continue in politics.[22] His statement was an allegation about the election result, rather than a finding that fraud had occurred.[22]

Two weeks before the 2019 election, Yishai withdrew Yachad from the race and announced his support for United Torah Judaism.[23] The party had been polling below the electoral threshold, following its failure to enter the Knesset in 2015.[23] Its withdrawal therefore ended that election campaign without another attempt to translate its support into parliamentary seats.[23]

In August 2026, Yishai was reported to be considering a political return with HaTzibur HaHaredi, or The Haredi Public, a new ultra-Orthodox party.[24] He had held several meetings with the organization, which sought to represent working Haredim and supported enlistment for young men who were not studying.[24] The reported discussions concerned a possible run, not a confirmed candidacy.[24] By that time, Yachad was described as defunct.[25]

Yishai’s approximately 14 years at the head of Shas encompassed ministerial service, coalition negotiations, and the party’s participation in several governments.[18][1] His public responsibilities ranged from labor and social welfare to industry, trade, and the Interior Ministry, with periods as deputy prime minister under both Sharon and Netanyahu.[1] His earlier work in Jerusalem municipal politics and Shas administration preceded that national leadership.[5]

Social benefits, religious education, and Jerusalem featured prominently in the political priorities advanced during his leadership.[2][13] His coalition demands linked child allowances to continued government participation, while the 2009 coalition agreement protected the independence of the Haredi school system.[2][13] A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs commentary on Haredi education also observes that Yishai and other Shas leaders sent their children to the Independent educational stream rather than the Shas-controlled Maayan stream.[26]

After leaving Shas, Yishai presented his new party as a continuation of Yosef’s legacy and an effort to cross religious and communal divisions.[19] The subsequent alliance with Otzma Yehudit failed to secure parliamentary representation in 2015, and Yishai later supported United Torah Judaism rather than contesting the 2019 election with Yachad.[4][23] His later discussions with a party seeking to represent working Haredim concerned another possible route back into public politics.[24]

In March 2010, the announcement of plans for 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s visit generated a diplomatic controversy involving Yishai’s Interior Ministry.[27] Both Yishai and Netanyahu expressed regret about the timing of the announcement.[27]

The December 2010 Carmel fire brought scrutiny of the Interior Ministry’s responsibility for the Fire and Rescue Services.[28] The fire lasted four days and nights, killed 44 people, forced nearly 17,000 to evacuate, and burned 8,650 acres.[28] The 2012 state comptroller’s findings described severe shortages: half the required equipment and vehicles, a quarter of the necessary personnel, and only 20 tons of fire suppressant against an emergency minimum of 450 tons.[29]

The comptroller assigned Yishai and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz “special personal responsibility” for poor readiness, while explicitly distinguishing responsibility from guilt for the victims’ deaths and recommending no specific action against the ministers.[30] Yishai had warned of the service’s condition and sought additional funding, but was criticized for an “all or nothing” approach to a comprehensive overhaul rather than identifying urgent needs and solutions within existing resources.[30] He disputed suggestions that he was personally responsible for the deaths and emphasized the distinction between fatalities and service readiness.[31]

Yishai’s migration policies included accelerating the southern border fence, constructing nearby holding facilities, sanctioning employers, and seeking lawful deportations.[32] He advocated voluntary return or transfer to a third country for Eritrean and Sudanese migrants and characterized most African arrivals as employment seekers; these were his positions and characterizations.[32] In February 2019, he said Yachad aspired for “every Jew to have both a father and a mother”; he denied responsibility for social-media posts opposing same-sex-parent families but did not condemn their message.[33]

Testifying to the Mount Meron state commission of inquiry on May 17, 2022, Yishai said he had not known about unsafe structures there.[34] He maintained that he had sought reforms but that professionals opposed some proposed changes; the account of his testimony noted no record that he approved plans.[34]