Moshe Abutbul

Moshe Abutbul was born in 1965 in Beersheba, where he attended a secular school.[1][2] At a young age he moved to Jerusalem to study at a religious boarding school, and later continued his yeshivah studies at Yeshivat Itrei in Jerusalem until he married.[1][2] He grew up in a traditional home and became Haredi later in life.[2]

Before entering politics, Abutbul served in the Israel Defense Forces, spending time in a military trackers unit and in the IDF Rabbinate.[2] He also worked as a DJ on a Haredi pirate radio station and acted in several films made for Haredi audiences.[2] Rabbi Reuven Elbaz, founder and dean of Jerusalem's Ohr Hachaim Yeshivah, recognized his abilities and appointed him Shas's representative on the Beit Shemesh City Council after the party was established.[1] He is married with eight children and lives in Beit Shemesh.[2]

Abutbul's public career began in 1993, when he joined the Beit Shemesh City Council as a Shas representative.[2] Over the following years he rose through the municipal hierarchy, serving as head of the municipality's Engineering and Construction Division, then as deputy mayor and acting mayor.[2] He was elected mayor of Beit Shemesh in 2008 and held the office until 2018.[2]

During his tenure, Abutbul presided over significant growth in Beit Shemesh, overseeing construction of some 40,000 housing units along with classrooms, kindergartens, playgrounds, shopping centers, and roads.[1] Supporters credited him with concrete local improvements, including new sidewalks, a well-baby clinic, and a road designed to ease traffic out of the city.[3] Critics and opposition figures, however, characterized aspects of his administration as neglectful or as favoring specific communities over others—assessments that remained politically contested throughout his time in office.[3]

Abutbul won reelection in October 2013, defeating opponent Eli Cohen by 956 votes.[4] The result was subsequently challenged after investigators discovered about 160 identity documents in an apartment and vehicle connected to the investigation.[4] The Jerusalem District Court ordered new elections for both the mayoralty and the city council, finding that impersonators had voted using other people's identity documents and that the scale of the fraud was comparable to the margins affecting the results.[4] The court described an organized system or "industry" of fraud that was planned and intended to help elect Abutbul and associated council candidates.[4] Crucially, it stated that no evidence or allegation had been presented that Abutbul was personally involved in the fraud.[4] Abutbul's side challenged the decision, arguing that the evidence was insufficient to justify a citywide rerun.[4]

In the court-ordered repeat election held in March 2014, Abutbul again defeated Eli Cohen, receiving 19,190 votes (51.3%) to Cohen's 18,230 (48.7%), on a turnout of 76%—higher than the 69% recorded in October.[5] Cohen conceded, and Abutbul indicated that he would invite him to join a broad municipal coalition.[5] Calcalist reported two suspected attempts at double voting during the repeat election, while Abutbul said the result disproved allegations of a systematic fraud operation in the rerun.[5]

Abutbul stood for a third mayoral term in 2018, running at the head of the United Torah Judaism municipal list while urging his supporters to vote for Shas.[6] After the initial count showed him leading challenger Aliza Bloch by 251 votes, the addition of provisional ballots—cast by soldiers, prisoners, and voters at accessible polling stations—reversed the result over the course of nearly ten hours of counting.[6] The final tally gave Bloch 22,464 votes to Abutbul's 21,931, a margin of 533 votes.[6] The defeat ended Abutbul's decade as mayor.

Following his mayoral defeat, Shas leader Aryeh Deri recruited Abutbul to stand for the Knesset.[1] He was placed eighth on Shas's slate for the April 2019 election and ninth for the September 2019 election; Shas won eight seats in April and nine in September, with Abutbul entering the 22nd Knesset after the latter vote.[7] For the March 2020 election to the 23rd Knesset, he was listed ninth on the Shas slate, and the party won nine seats with 352,443 votes, or 7.70% of the total.[8] For the March 2021 election to the 24th Knesset, a World Jewish Congress candidate list placed him eighth on the Shas slate.[9]

Abutbul was listed eighth on Shas's slate for the 2022 election to the 25th Knesset, in which the party won 11 seats with 392,644 votes, or 8.24%.[10] For the October 2026 election to the 26th Knesset, he was moved up to seventh position on the party list.[11]

Abutbul served on several Knesset committees, including the Special Committee for Public Petitions, the Committee on Public Projects until early July 2026, and the Special Committee for the Rights of the Child during the preceding government.[1] He served as deputy minister of agriculture and food security from January 2023 to July 2025.[1]

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter tasked Abutbul with recruiting volunteers to help farmers work their fields after Palestinian laborers were barred from entering Israel for security reasons and many foreign workers had departed.[1] Abutbul described the initiative, which drew on students and young people, as critical to preserving agricultural activity at a difficult moment. He also highlighted reducing water prices as a means of lowering farmers' costs.[1] In July 2025, when Shas left the government, Abutbul was among the party officials who ended their government posts.[12]

Abutbul ran again for mayor of Beit Shemesh in 2024 against incumbent Aliza Bloch and challenger Shmuel Greenberg.[13][14] He finished third in the first round and did not advance to the runoff. Reports gave slightly different first-round shares: N12 placed Greenberg at 35.1%, Bloch at 33.3%, and Abutbul at 31.6%, while Globes reported 35.7%, 32.4%, and 31.9%, respectively.[13][14] Shas subsequently joined the other major Haredi parties in backing Greenberg, who defeated Bloch in the runoff.[14]

Abutbul's public record links a long municipal career in Beit Shemesh with national service in Shas. His mayoral tenure included large-scale housing and infrastructure development, while his national career encompassed Knesset committee work and service as deputy minister of agriculture and food security.[1][2]

His agricultural work after the October 7 attack included organizing students and other young volunteers to help sustain Israeli farms during a shortage of available labor.[1] His continued participation in both national and Beit Shemesh politics after losing the mayoralty reflected his enduring position within Shas.

Several aspects of Abutbul's municipal tenure attracted public dispute. In 2013 he stated that there were no members of the LGBTQ community in Beit Shemesh and described the city as "holy and pure."[15] His administration's handling of modesty signage also drew legal attention: in 2017 the Supreme Court ordered the municipality to remove signs demanding that women dress modestly, which the Abutbul administration had characterized as "ideological signs."[15] Critics and residents associated his years in office with broader tensions over religious coexistence, gender segregation, and the treatment of non-Haredi inhabitants—characterizations that remained politically and socially contested.[15]

The 2013 election fraud findings represent the most serious controversy attached to his name. Courts found organized impersonation fraud on a scale comparable to the margins affecting the election and concluded that the activity was intended to help elect Abutbul and associated council candidates.[4] The court nonetheless explicitly found that no evidence or allegation implicated Abutbul personally.[4] The procedural path to the 2014 rerun is described at different legal stages in the reports: Ynet covered the Jerusalem District Court's order for a rerun, while Calcalist described the Supreme Court as having disqualified the October results.[4][5]