Mizrakhi (political party)
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Mizrakhi (Hebrew: המזרחי, HaMizrakhi) was a political party in Israel and is one of the ancestors of the modern-day National Religious Party.
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[edit] Name
Mizrakhi is a Hebrew acronym for Religious Centre (Hebrew: מרכז רוחני, Merkaz Rukhani) and does not refer to Mizrakhi Jews (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East), an important distinction as party members were primarily Ashkenazi, i.e. of European descent.
[edit] History
The Mizrakhi movement was founded in 1902 in Vilnius as a religious-Zionist organisation. It also had a trade union, the Mizrakhi Workers, started in 1921. In Mandate Palestine, the movement developed into a political party, HaMizrakhi.
For the elections for the first Knesset it ran as part of a joint list called the United Religious Front alongside the Mizrakhi Workers, Agudat Israel and Agudat Israel Workers. The group won 16 seats, of which the Mizrakhi Party took two, making it the third largest party in the Knesset after Mapai and Mapam. It was invited to join the coalition government by David Ben Gurion.
The United Religious Front played a major part in bringing down the first government due to it disagreement with Mapai over issues pertaining to education in the new immigrant camps and the religious education system, as well as its demands that the Supply and Rationing Ministry be closed and a businessman appointed as Minister for Trade and Industry. Ben Gurion resigned on 15 October, 1950. When the problems had been solved two weeks later, he formed the second government with the same coalition partners and ministers as previously.
In the 1951 elections the party ran for the Knesset alone. However, they won only two seats. They joined the coalition that made up the third government, and both its MKs were made ministers; David-Zvi Pinkas became Minister of Transportation and Mordechai Nurock became Minister of Postal Services. However, when the third government collapsed, both Pinkas and Nurock lost their ministerial positions, although the party remained in the coalitions of the fourth, fifth and sixth governments.
For the 1955 elections the party joined forces with its ideological twin, the Mizrakhi Workers, to form the National Religious Front. The new party won 11 seats, making it the fourth largest, and were again coalition partners in both governments of the third Knesset. In 1956 the union of the two parties was made permanent, and the name changed to the National Religious Party, which remains an influential force in Israeli politics to this day.
[edit] Knesset Members
| Knesset (MKs) |
Knesset Members |
|---|---|
| 2nd (2) |
Mordechai Nurock, David-Zvi Pinkas (replaced by Shlomo-Israel Ben-Meir) |
