About She'arim

She'arim

She'arim, whose name meant "Gates," was the Hebrew newspaper of Po'alei Agudat Israel, the ultra-Orthodox workers' party known by its Hebrew initials as Pa"i. Published in Tel Aviv, it began irregularly in the 1930s, settled into a regular weekly in 1945, and in 1951 became a daily newspaper, the form in which it was best known. The daily ran until 1981, after which the paper continued for a period as a weekly before closing completely. For three decades She'arim was one of the two principal Haredi daily newspapers in Israel, alongside Agudat Israel's HaModia, and it gave the small Po'alei Agudat Israel movement a daily presence in the party press of the young state. Its circulation was concentrated among the members of its own movement, but its pages carried the Torah essays and ideological articles of leading rabbis and religious writers, and in 1976 a scoop by its reporter Israel Katzover set in motion the parliamentary chain of events that ended in the dissolution of the Knesset and, indirectly, in the electoral upheaval of 1977 that ended three decades of Labour rule.

She'arim belonged to the world of the Israeli party press, in which every political movement maintained its own newspaper as a matter of course. What distinguished it was the particular identity of its party: Po'alei Agudat Israel combined strict Orthodox Judaism with the organisation of religious workers, and its paper spoke for a public that the secular Labour press and the larger Orthodox parties alike did not represent. The history of She'arim, from one-off internal leaflets marked "not for sale" to a daily of record for its camp, traced the growth of that public from the Yishuv of the Mandate period into the Israel of the 1980s.

Origins in the 1930s

The paper began to appear in Tishrei of the Hebrew year 5695, in the autumn of 1934, on an irregular basis. Surveys of the Hebrew press dated its irregular beginnings to the same Mandate years in which the other party papers of the Yishuv were taking shape, and in which Agudat Israel, the parent Orthodox movement from which the workers' party had emerged, already published its own weekly, Kol Israel, founded in 1922. From the start She'arim was the organ of Po'alei Agudat Israel, and its irregular issues served a movement that was small in numbers and limited in resources, unable at first to sustain a newspaper on a fixed schedule. The issues of those years appeared when the movement's needs and means allowed, rather than to a regular timetable.

The Irregular Years and HaAtid

In May 1939 a weekly named HaAtid, "The Future," began to appear as the paper of Po'alei Agudat Israel, but it did not last long, and publication reverted to the earlier irregular pattern, with some of the issues marked as a "one-time edition." From April 1941 those one-off issues were once more headed with the name She'arim, bearing the marking "internal distribution" or "internal, not for sale." The paper of those years was thus closer to an internal movement bulletin than to a commercial newspaper: it circulated inside the party, carrying its positions and notices to its own people, without being offered for public sale. The alternation of names and formats reflected both the poverty of the undertaking and the conditions of the war years, when the Yishuv's smaller publications struggled to appear at all.

A Regular Weekly from 1945

From the beginning of 1945, issues of She'arim began to appear regularly every week. At first the issues still carried the marking "internal, not for sale," but in time they were distributed with a price, becoming a paper that could be bought like any other. The paper's own issues later counted the beginning of its publication from the start of 1945, treating the regular weekly of that year, rather than the irregular sheets of the 1930s, as its true founding. As a settled weekly, She'arim joined the established party press of the late Yishuv, and it passed with its movement through the upheavals of 1948 and the founding of the State of Israel. By 1955 it was able to mark its thousandth issue with a special supplement, in which the party leader Benjamin Mintz contributed an article under the title "The Gates of the Movement Are Open," playing on the paper's name, and Shmuel Rotstein contributed a history of the Haredi press, a sign that the paper understood itself as part of a longer Orthodox journalistic tradition.

Becoming a Daily in 1951

In 1951, the Hebrew year 5711, on the initiative of the leader of the party, Benjamin Mintz, She'arim became a daily newspaper. The transformation placed the small workers' party of Orthodox Judaism in the ranks of the movements that maintained a daily organ, the recognised mark of a serious political camp in the Israel of the 1950s, when most of the country's seventeen or so dailies were affiliated to political parties, unions or the government. A daily rhythm changed the paper's character: instead of a weekly summary for the faithful, She'arim now reported and commented on events as they happened, presenting the position of Po'alei Agudat Israel on the current questions of the day. The daily paper ran in that form for thirty years, until 1981. It was published in Tel Aviv, the centre of the Hebrew press, and it served a readership that was largely identical with the membership and sympathisers of its party, a small camp within the wider Orthodox public, most of whose readers in those years had the larger Agudat Israel's HaModia, founded in 1950 as the first wide-circulation Haredi daily in the state, as their alternative.

Editors and Journalists

The first editor of She'arim was Yaakov Brunner, and his deputy was Yehuda Nahshoni. In the 1960s Nahshoni was appointed editor, and he served in the post until the paper's closure, giving She'arim an unusual continuity of editorship across the last two decades of the daily. Surveys of the party press likewise recorded the paper as edited over many years by Nahshoni and Brunner. Among its journalists were Naftali Kraus, Moshe Karovka, the father of Rabbi Zeev Karov, Aryeh Albert, Aryeh Avivi, the father of Rabbi Yosef Avivi, Noah Svir, and Israel Katzover, the reporter whose 1976 exposure gave the paper its most consequential moment in national politics. The staff was drawn from within the Orthodox world the paper served, and several of its writers were themselves members of rabbinic families, a pattern characteristic of the Haredi press, in which journalism and religious scholarship overlapped.

A Platform for Torah and Ideas

In its peak years She'arim served as a central platform for Torah and ideological articles by rabbis, writers, poets and religious public figures. Among those whose work appeared in it were Rabbi Rafael Katzenelbogen, Rabbi Isser Frankel, Rabbi Ben Zion Firer, Yosef Zvi Rimon, Yaakov Rimon, Rabbi David Halhami and Rabbi Nathan Ortner. Alongside its news and party reporting, the paper thus functioned as a journal of religious thought for its camp, in which questions of Torah scholarship and ideology were argued out in print. As the organ of Po'alei Agudat Israel it presented the party's position on the topical issues on the public agenda, and its pages recorded the distinctive stance of a movement that combined Orthodox observance with participation in the institutions of the state and in the world of organised labour, a stance that separated it both from the secular parties and from the more separatist wings of the Orthodox world.

Readers and Distribution

The paper's circulation was mainly among the people of Po'alei Agudat Israel itself. It was also sent to rabbis and to Haredi and religious public figures in Israel and abroad, so that its readership extended beyond the party's membership to the wider Orthodox leadership at home and in the Diaspora. Like the other Haredi papers of the period, She'arim supplied its readers principally with news from within its own sector, from Israel and from the Jewish world, filtered through the norms of the Orthodox press. In the first decades of the state, the Haredi public's two main dailies were HaModia and She'arim, with few other periodicals beside them, and within that enclosed media world the paper of the small workers' party held a secure, if modest, place, sustained by the loyalty of a defined readership rather than by competition on the open news-stand.

The F-15 Scoop and the Road to 1977

The paper's greatest national impact came at the end of 1976. In that year its reporter Israel Katzover revealed that the ceremony marking the arrival of the first F-15 aircraft of the Israel Air Force would cause the desecration of the Sabbath by those taking part in it, since the proceedings would run into the Sabbath. Political commentators attributed to She'arim the first step that led to the electoral upheaval of 1977. The exposure led to a motion of no confidence submitted in the Knesset on 14 December 1976 by the United Torah Front, the joint list of Agudat Israel and Po'alei Agudat Israel. That step in turn provoked what was called the "brilliant exercise" of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the dissolution of the Knesset, and it led indirectly to the upheaval in the elections that followed, in which Labour lost power for the first time and Menachem Begin's Likud formed the government. A party newspaper of a small Orthodox workers' movement had thus supplied the spark for the most consequential political turn in Israel's history to that date, a demonstration of the leverage that the religious parties, and their press, could exercise within Israel's coalition politics.

From Daily to Weekly and Final Closure

The daily edition of She'arim came to an end in 1981, after thirty years. The paper did not disappear at once: from 1982 it was converted from a daily into a weekly, and it continued in that form for a period before closing completely. Its trajectory followed the general law of the Israeli party press, in which the weakening of a party drained its newspaper of readers and resources until the paper was closed for lack of budget and of a public, or was reduced, as in the case of She'arim, from a daily to a weekly. Po'alei Agudat Israel itself faded as an independent political force, and its organ could not outlive the movement that sustained it. Reference summaries of the Hebrew press recorded the whole span of the paper, from its irregular beginnings in the 1930s to its final closure, as one of the long lives of the party press era, and its party's own record described the organ as published for many years as a daily under its editors, and afterwards as a weekly until it closed entirely.

Place in the Haredi Press

She'arim was remembered as the daily voice of a distinctive and now vanished formation, the Orthodox workers' movement of Po'alei Agudat Israel, and as one of the two principal Haredi dailies of Israel's first decades. Its history illustrated the full life cycle of the Israeli party newspaper: irregular internal beginnings under the Mandate, regularisation as a weekly in the 1940s, elevation to a daily in the party-press heyday of the 1950s, a long career as the platform of a religious camp, a single intervention, the F-15 affair, that changed national history, and decline with its party into weekly publication and closure. The Haredi press that succeeded it, the weeklies and factional papers that multiplied from the 1980s, operated in a different world from the disciplined party dailies, and She'arim's files remained as the record of the era in which a small Orthodox workers' party believed that its faith and its politics required a newspaper of its own, published every day.