Eli Yishai has asked Moshe Hager, a prominent figure in Judea and Samaria and among Army Reservists, to run on his Yachad (Together) party. Hager told The Jewish Press Monday he has not yet decided whether to enter politics.

Pre-election polls so far have left Yishai’s party on the borderline of winning the minimum number of votes necessary for a party to enter the Knesset.

Hagar is a Colonel in the Reserves and founded the first “mechina” religious pre-army Torah Academy in 1991 in Beit Yatir, located on the southern edge of Judea and Samaria, northeast of Be’er Sheva. He also is a nephew of former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Hager-Lau.

Yishai’s choice of Hagar indicates he is not interested in Michael Ben-Ari, who heads his own Otzma party that has no chance of succeeding in the elections.

Unlike Ben-Ari, noted for provocative gimmicks to embarrass leftists, Hagar has an image of moderation and co-existence with those of different opinions although he is strongly rightwing.

A descendant of the Vishnitz dynasty, his running with Yishai might attract more Ashkenazi voters as well as thousands of Israelis who have learned in his mechina and served under his command in active and reserve duty.

When Hager took a leave of absence several years ago, he was replaced by Rabbi Avichai Ronski, who now is candidate on the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) list of candidates.

Aryeh Deri is pulling down the curtain on his third-grade political acrobatic stunt and will play the part of the most humble man on the planet Monday when he accepts a rabbi’s order to return to head whatever remains of the Shas Sephardi Haredi party.

Deri quit last month, vowing never to return, after a leaked video showed the party’s founder and spiritual leader, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, praising Deri’s political enemy Eli Yishai and calling Deri “evil” because of the bribery scandal that landed him in the slammer for three years.

Deri performed a splendid act of saying he could not possibly return to the Shas party after a still-unknown instigator exposed the video and supposedly disgraced the holiness of Rabbi Yosef.

It is not clear why so many people think that the video shamed the late rabbi. His image actually should have been considered more holy for his having stated a politician caught for bribery is not exactly the figure who should lead Shas.

The fact that people think the opposite says a lot about the Shas political party, where the sheepish followers of Rabbi Yosef and his family worship and embalm his image,

Deri set the stage for Rabbi Shalom Cohen, head of Shas’ so-called Council of Sages, to order Deri to come back in his black hat on his white horse and head the party.

“You have no permission to leave, I order you to come back and lead the holy movement,” Rabbi Cohen commanded him.

The holy Deri will lead the holy Shas to attract the holy voters to serve in the unholy Knesset where Shas has the holy mission to cut holy deals for its holy institutions.

Deri played out the soap opera of the video leak for every vote he could.

Pre-election polls have shown that Deri will draw around seven seats in the Knesset elections March 17.  Yishai’s new party is teetering on the edge of drawing enough support for the minimum number of votes to enter the Knesset.

The Likud party has sailed past the Labor-Livni party in a new poll taken after early returns in the Likud primary elections Thursday night pointed to a more centrist list of candidates.

The survey for Walla! News by Teleseker (TNS) also shows that the Yisrael Beitenu party, headed by Avigdor Lieberman, has suffered sharp losses following the suspected bribe scandal revealed by police last week.

With ideological right-winger Moshe Feiglin off a realistic place on the Likud list of candidates, the Likud came up with 26 projected seats in the Knesset, while Labor-Livni remained stuck with 23.

However, an Israel Radio poll taken after the Likud primary elections still puts Labor-Livni one seat ahead of the Likud.

The TNS poll revealed that 40 percent of the respondents think that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is the best man to lead the government, and only 24.3 percent gave their support for Yitzchak Herzog, chairman of the Labor party, and his new sidekick Tzipi Livni. The two Labor party leaders agreed that they will be rotating prime ministers if their party forms the next government, which seems unlikely if the polls don’t change dramatically before the March 17 elections.

The Jewish Home party continues to remain with 16 projected Knesset Members in all polls, one-third more than it had in the outgoing Knesset.

A Globes poll taken before the Likud primaries, like the TNS survey, shows that the Yisrael Beitenu would win only seven seats in the Knesset if elections were held today.

Both the Globes and TNS polls give Shas a new lease on life since the leak earlier this week of a video showing the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was the first and last word in the Haredi Sephardi party, trashing Aryeh Deri and favoring Eli Yishai, who now heads his own party.

Shas would win seven seats in the Knesset, according to TNS, and six according to the Globes poll, while Yishai would come up with nothing, according to both polls.

The standing of Yesh Atid, headed by Yair Lapid, and Kulanu, the new party founded by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, remain virtually unchanged, with each one  projected to win nine or ten Knesset seats.

Both polls give the left-wing Meretz party seven seats.

The bottom line is that Netanyahu will form the next government, and the Opposition may be even weaker than before.

The more that the merged Labor-Livni party cannot make headway, the more that Kahlon will mind his Ps and Qs to make sure he can get what he wants out of joining a coalition led by the Likud.

However, at this stage, a coalition of Likud, Jewish Home, Kahlon and Yisrael Beitenu still leaves Netanyahu four seats shy of a majority.

His choices are either or both of the Haredi parties because it is difficult to see Lapid and Netanyahu working together. If Lapid suddenly starts distancing himself from Labor and begins talking about the importance of Jews in Judea and Samaria, it would mean his ego finally is deflated, which would be the eighth wonder of the world.

But today’s polls are not the last word, and I am not going out on a long or weak limb to predict that Jewish home, headed by Naftali Bennett, will pick up more seats at the expense of Likud, Kahlon and possibly Yisrael Beitenu.

The Shas Council of Sages has refused to accept Aryeh Deri’s resignation as head of the Shas party.

The rabbis from Shas’s Council of Sages went to Deri’s home to personally let him know their decision. But Deri wasn’t there or wasn’t making himself available to greet them.

Following the release of the Rav Ovadia video yesterday, in which Rav Ovadia had harsh words to say about Aryeh Deri, Deri spent the day trying to redirect the message and say that whoever released the video disgraced the name of Rav Ovadia.

From the start, the resignation letter appears to have been a tactic to show Sephardi voters that Shas’s rabbis stand behind him and to shift the conversation away from the video.

According to Channel 2, Deri withdrew his resignation in response to the council’s request.

But according to Channel 10, Deri’s wife said the resignation was real, and Deri was prepared to become a regular Shas MK, and not the party head, and he wasn’t available to meet with the Rabbis at the time.

Kol Yisrael says that Deri refused to meet the Rabbis, and he told his family that he is determined to no longer be the party chairman.

The saga continues…

Following the release of the Rav Ovadia video yesterday, in which Rav Ovadia had harsh words to say about Aryeh Deri, Deri spent the day trying to redirect the message and say that whoever released the video disgraced the name of Rav Ovadia.

But no one was buying it.

On Monday evening, Aryeh Deri tried a different tactic, perhaps his only one.

Deri told the Shas Council of Sages that he is offering to resign as head of the Shas party.

At this point he is waiting for the council to reject his offer and that they will ask him to stay on, which he hopes will bolster his standing as a result.

Deri is betting the farm, but he doesn’t have any other options besides this one at this point.

Of course, it may not be such a big risk, after all, Deri knows where all of Shas’s skeletons are buried.

Stay tuned…

A leaked video showing the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef castigating Aryeh Deri, now the leader of the Shas party, has set off an earthquake in the Sephardi religious community, already split into at least three factions.

Among other epithets, Rav Ovadia, as he was affectionately known, called Deri “evil, “too independent,” and the rabbi said he cannot be a “traitor” to Eli Yishai, who succeeded Deri, Shas’ political leader after the 1999 elections. One year later, Deri was convicted for bribery and was sentenced to three years in jail.

Ever since Rav Ovadia, the founder and spiritual leader of Shas, died in October 2013, the party began to fall apart without his monolithic leadership.

Whatever Rav Ovadia said was gospel to hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jews, even those not considerably religious.

No one is taking “credit” for leaking the video, which was shown on Channel 2, but the damage to Shas, Deri, the memory of Rav Ovadia, and Deri’s arch enemy Eli Yishai is immeasurable.

In the 76-second video of Rav Ovadia talking to family members and an aide in 2008, he said:

If we place [Deri] at the top of the [party] list, 20 to 40 percent will leave us. Why? Because he was judged as a thief. For what? So they should try me in court? Why take a bribe?

Aryeh won’t listen to me. He is too independent. He is not a bad person?…He can go to another party…. What do I care? …

I cannot be a traitor to Eli Yishai.

The video, seen below is complete with Hebrew sub-titles.

Yishai and his aides, of course, deny they leaked the video.

Deri and his camp, of course, accuse Yishai of leaking it and said it will cause a backlash against Yishai because voters will blame Yishai for leaking the video that (somehow) defames the memory Rav Ovadia.

Deri said after the video was aired on television:

 In these days when the public expects unity, the man who calls himself ‘faithful’ chose to release tapes in which he recorded [Rav Ovadia] in the darkness like the worst of the subversives, and exploited the trust placed in him. Yishai is trampling the honor of [Rav Ovadia] only for his petty personal interests….Even in his lifetime he betrayed the trust the rabbi placed in him.

It does not matter now who leaked the video. The damage is done and there is more on the way.

“The real black box is hidden and still is in the safe, and we hope we won’t have to bring it out because if they are published, they will cause an earthquake. Our aim is to retain the honor of Rav Ovadia,” said Rav Ovadia’s family

When the family heard that the video of Rav Ovadia trashing Deri had been exposed, they said, “We were in shock. We didn’t want this to be exposed… This video is tiny compared with the material we have.”

Will the black box be opened? And who will it make an earthquake for?

“Only is there is no choice,” the family said.

Either way, the once mighty Shas is puny.

It was doomed from the  start to becoming a comatose party like every other political party that evolves around one person and only one person.

Remember Shinui, the fiercely secular party headed by Tomy Lapid? It won 17 seats in 1977, split into factions and won only two seats in the next elections. It  came roaring back with 15 Knesset Members in 2003 and then died after splitting up again not several useless factions.

Ditto with Rafi Eitan’s Pensioners’ party, which won a stunning seven seas in the 2006 elections and then fell apart.

A new pre-election poll issued on Monday leaves no option for the next government other than one headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with the help of Haredi parties.

Here is the lineup according to the “Panels” poll conducted the Knesset Channel :

Labor-Livni – 23

Likud – 21

Jewish Home – 16

Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid) – 11

Kulanu (Moshe Kahlon) – 9

Yisrael Beitenu – 7

Meretz – 7

Arab parties – 10

Yehadut HaTorah (Haredi) 7

Shas – 5

Eli Yishai – 4

The Labor party, headed by Yitzchak Herzog with his new sidekick Tzipi Livni, cannot form a majority the Haredi parties, which won’t happen unless it can convince two of four parties – Yair Lapid ,Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman and Meretz – to agree, which as likely as snow in July.

The center-right ring camp has less of a problem with the Haredi parties.

Adding up Likud, Jewish Home, Yisrael Beiteinu and Kahlon comes up with the non-magical number of 55, six less than the majority that is needed to form the government.

The three Haredi parties are in the driver’s seat for the time being, and if the results in March will be similar to those of today, they will dictate the terms of the next coalition.

If that happens, Lapid and Livni will rue the day they worked against the coalition of which they were a part.

The polls are not meaningless and actually are a factor in how people will vote. If voters see that the next government will be under the thumb of Haredi partiers, they might start shifting their votes.

Supporters of Yesh Atid and Labor-Livni might shift a bit to Kahlon, possibly enough to give Netanyahu a majority of 61 without the Haredi parties.

Herzog, Livni and Lapid have a problem because there is not much they can take from other parties.