Adina Bar-Shalom, an Israel Prize winner and daughter of the Shas political party's late spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, slammed faction leader Aryeh Deri and announced that she will run in the next elections for the Knesset.
"You may call me naive, but many believed Aryeh Deri and my father believed in him. But Aryeh changed,. He's not the Aryeh he used to be," alleged Bar Shalom on Thursday.
"Everything changed in him," she added. "You see him, you remember him what he was 15 years ago? I ask you, is this the same Aryeh?"
Bar-Shalom went on to say that she will launch a new political party after deciding that Deri had taken Shas in a direction contrary to her father's wishes. "Aryeh turned toward the Lithuanians, period," she said. I decided to be the person in a place where there is no one, I want to take the commitment and desire to see change in my society."
'Lithuanians' is a common term in the haredi community to refer to non-hassidic haredim. The Shas party traditionally represented the Sephardic haredim, while the UTJ faction promoted the interests of the hassidic and Lithuanian members of the community.
A 72-year-old mother of three, Bar-Shalom won the 2014 Israel Prize for her work as a haredi educator, including the founding of the first haredi women’s college in 2001.
Bar-Shalom drew criticism in 2011 when she endorsed a plan calling on Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and enable the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. In May of that year, Bar-Shalom again raised eyebrows when she joined a delegation of Israeli activists in a meeting with senior Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah.
Bar-Shalom' had supported Shas while it was headed by her father Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef until he passed away in October 2013. She has since become an avowed opponent of Shas and its leader Aryeh Deri, saying last March that "it is a shame that he went to jail and became completely corrupt."