Preliminary Observations About the WZO Preliminary Results

There are some (pleasant) surprises, and some lessons to be learned.

The results are only tentative, since thousands of votes are being challenged as possibly fraudulent. Entire slates are being challenged.

Nonetheless, we can tentatively draw some conclusions.

Eretz Hakodesh (EH) drew about 50% more voters than five years ago, despite a vigorous campaign from parts of charedi leadership to frame voting as prohibited. It can be assumed that those who voted Eretz Hakodesh identify as charedim. The push to view voting as a violation of long-standing policy of detesting anything connected with Zionism was forceful and ubiquitous. That means that those who voted did not simply fail to receive the memo. They were defying one message in the charedi world for different ones they received from their own guides and mentors. Or, they didn’t see it as an issue that required a Torah luminary to pass judgment on, and voted their own conscience.

All of which means that parts of the US charedi establishment are in trouble. Invoking party discipline didn’t work. But then again, the lay leadership of those groups already sensed that.

The new kid on the block – Am Yisrael Chai, essentially the slate of the wonderful kiruv efforts of Olami – went from rags to riches, garnering more votes than any slate other than Reform. Heck, they did better than rags-to-riches. Five years ago, they weren’t even rags. Yes, they outvoted EH. We’re going to have to ponder this one. The slate was certainly charedi and charedi-friendly. Could be that Olami’s pitch about how they envisioned using WZO support was more upbeat and positive than EH’s message of keeping support away from the heterodox parties that have consistently fought Torah-friendly projects.

The Modern Orthodox slate (a partnership of the OU and Mizrachi) was only a few thousand votes behind EH. I thought they would do better. Part of the explanation has to be that the MO share of the Orthodox pie continues to shrink. Not because they are doing anything wrong, or suffering from great attrition, but because they cannot match the birth rate of those further to the right. Still, they are much better communicators, and their natural constituency could be expected to be more easily linked through social media. Might it be that even as the EH vote showed that Anglo-charedim are not as locked into authority regarding matters they do not see as halachic, the MO community knows much less authority, and could not be incentivized by its community leaders to get out and vote? We’ll have to wait for the analysis and spin from within the MO world to learn what happened.

Five years ago, before the previous election, Orthodox presence – especially right-of-center Orthodox presence – within the WZO was nugatory. EH changed that, dramatically. If you combine EH, Am Yisrael Chai, and a half-dozen small Orthodox slates, you are looking at a changed Jewish world. (And properly, you should add the Modern Orthodox slate, which is likely to vote for the same projects that the parties further to the right will support.) In a word, the Orthodox world, which supposedly only amounts to 10% of American Jewry, made the heterodox movements look like a Tesla left for a few hours in front of a convention of Democratic Socialists. We swamped them.

Not surprisingly, the Open Orthodox slate got nowhere at all.

The Orthodox showing does demand a reassessment of the role that Orthodox Jews play in the general good of the world Jewish community. Hopefully, many people will see the victory as a blessing that come with responsibility. Some will conclude that “Zionism” needn’t be a dirty word. All should come to understand that Orthodoxy cannot sit on the sidelines of the greater Jewish community as it did for decades after the Holocaust, slowly rebuilding what had been lost. We are at a point where HKBH wants more from us now.