About Srugim

Srugim

Srugim is a Hebrew-language news and content website based in Jerusalem that serves Israel's Religious Zionist, or national-religious, public. Publishing at srugim.co.il since 2010, it combines general news with reporting written specifically for and about its sector: news of the hesder yeshivas, internal debates within the national-religious community, rabbinic rulings and question-and-answer columns, alongside material on relationships, recipes and culture. Its name is the key to its identity. "Srugim" means "knitted" or "crocheted", and it refers to the knitted kippot — the crocheted skullcaps — worn by national-religious men, from which the community takes its familiar Israeli nickname, "the knitted kippot".

Founding and ownership

The Srugim website began operating in Adar 5770, corresponding to early 2010, according to its Hebrew Wikipedia record. It is owned through the company Srugim Ltd, and Hebrew reference sources record the site as owned by the Israeli-French businessman Patrick Drahi. The founding date places Srugim in the wave of sector-specific digital outlets that appeared in Israel once general portals such as Ynet and Walla! had proved the online news model: rather than compete for every Hebrew reader, Srugim set out to be the daily news home of one defined community. Jerusalem, its listed base, is a natural home for such a site: the city is a major centre of national-religious life, education and politics, and many of the institutions the site covers — yeshivas, movements and rabbinic authorities — are based there or look to it.

The audience: the national-religious public

The national-religious, or dati leumi, public is one of the main sectors of Jewish Israeli society: Orthodox in religious observance, Zionist in ideology, and integrated into the state's military, universities, professions and politics to a degree that distinguishes it from the Haredi public. The crocheted kippa is its visible symbol, worn by most men in the community, and Israeli slang accordingly calls its members "srugim" — "the knitted ones". Reference works note the sector's internal range, from more liberal, modern-Orthodox currents to the more stringent national-Haredi current known as Hardalim. A news site for this audience must therefore do two things at once: report Israel's general news in a frame its readers trust, and report the community's own affairs — its rabbis, schools, yeshivas, settlements, youth movements and political parties — with an insider's knowledge that general outlets rarely match.

What Srugim publishes

Srugim's own Hebrew description summarises its mix: a news and content site intended for the national-religious public, where, alongside news about the hesder yeshivas and internal sector discussions, readers can also find general news, and the site additionally contains content dealing with relationships, halachic rulings, question-and-answer exchanges with rabbis, recipes and culture. Each element of that list is deliberate. Hesder yeshivas — which combine Torah study with military service — are flagship institutions of Religious Zionism, and their doings are news for this readership in a way they are not for a general audience. Halacha content and rabbinic Q&A columns serve readers who organise daily life by Jewish law and want guidance in a digital format. Recipes, relationships and culture content make the site a daily habit rather than only a source for headlines. Around those sector staples, Srugim publishes the full general news file — politics, security, economy and society — so that a reader need not leave the sector's own site to follow the national story.

A platform for the sector's public debates

Srugim functions as a noticeboard and arena for the national-religious community's public arguments. A documented example came in March 2017, when a group of leading Religious Zionist rabbis and educators published, in Hebrew on the Srugim website, an open letter arguing that Orthodox women should not volunteer for combat roles in Israel Defense Forces units requiring close physical contact between male and female soldiers, while affirming the religious duty of military or national service. The letter, signed by figures including Efrat's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Tzohar founder Rabbi David Stav, intervened in the controversy surrounding comments by Rabbi Yigal Levenstein of the Bnei David pre-military academy in Eli, and it was reported internationally through the TPS news agency precisely because Srugim was where the sector's rabbis chose to publish. The episode shows the site's role clearly: when Religious Zionist leadership wants to address its own public — and, through it, the country — Srugim is one of the places it publishes.

Politics and the sector

Political coverage is central to Srugim because the national-religious public is one of the most politically organised sectors in Israel, historically represented by its own parties and, in recent decades, influential well beyond them. The site reports on the parties competing for the sector's vote, on religious-national politicians in the larger parties, on settlement affairs, on education and religious-services policy, and on the recurring questions that animate the community: the character of military service, the status of religion-and-state arrangements, and relations with both the Haredi and the secular publics. For outside observers — journalists, researchers and officials — Srugim is consequently a primary source for what the sector is arguing about, in its own language and on its own terms, before those arguments surface in the general press.

Not the television series

The website shares its name with, but is a separate entity from, the Israeli television drama Srugim, which aired on Yes TV between 2008 and 2012. The series, created by Eliezer "Laizy" Shapira and Hava Divon, depicted five national-religious singles in Jerusalem's Katamon neighbourhood and took its title from the same crocheted skullcaps. The coincidence is more than a naming clash: both the drama and the news site draw on the same sociological reality — a large, self-aware religious-Zionist community in Jerusalem and across Israel that recognises itself in the word "srugim". The news site, however, is a journalistic operation, not a fiction property, and references to "Srugim" in Israeli political and religious news almost always mean the website.

Position among Israel's sector news sites

Israeli digital media is unusually rich in sector outlets, and Srugim is the national-religious entry in a set that also includes Haredi sites such as Kikar HaShabbat and Behadrei Haredim, the Religious Zionist veteran Arutz Sheva, and Arabic-language and Russian-language portals for those publics. Within that ecology, Srugim is generally listed among Israel's leading sector news sites. Its competitive ground is trust and fluency: it assumes readers who keep Shabbat and kashrut, who know the names of yeshivas and rabbis without explanation, and who want national news filtered through a newsroom that shares those assumptions. General portals can out-scale it, but they cannot easily replicate that fluency.

Language, format and everyday use

Srugim publishes in Hebrew only, in the conventions of an Israeli news site: a continuously updated homepage, sector and general news channels, opinion and Torah content, video and photo material, and lifestyle sections. Its everyday rhythm follows its community's calendar as well as the news cycle — Shabbat and festival times, the yeshiva academic year, memorial and national days, and the community's own conferences and events all shape its coverage. For many readers it serves as a homepage in the classic portal sense: the one site checked for both the country's headlines and the community's.

Significance

Srugim matters because it documents, and helps to constitute, one of Israel's most consequential publics. Founded in 2010 and based in Jerusalem, it gave the national-religious sector a general-news site of its own — not a party organ, not a Torah journal and not a general portal with a religion page, but a daily newspaper-format website in which hesder yeshiva news, rabbinic letters, halacha columns and Knesset politics belong in the same publication. In a media system organised increasingly by sector, Srugim is the knitted-kippa sector's front page, and an essential source for anyone seeking to understand Religious Zionism as it understands itself.

That dual loyalty — to the general Israeli news agenda and to the internal life of one sector — is the editorial balance on which the site's credibility rests. A reader of Srugim can follow a coalition crisis and a dispute over yeshiva funding in the same visit, written by journalists who treat both as first-order news. It is this combination, rather than any single feature, that has made a site founded in 2010 into a fixture of Israel's sector media and a standard citation for the mood of the national-religious public.