Israel’s Labor Party elected Merav Michaeli on Sunday as its new party leader ahead of the March elections. Michaeli easily defeated several rivals in the party’s primaries, receiving 77% of the vote.
A month ago, outgoing Labor chairman Economy Minister Amir Peretz announced he is stepping down as the leader of the beleaguered party.
An intriguing fact about Michaeli is that she is the granddaughter of Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist and lawyer who, on one hand, is known for having helped Jews escape from Europe during the Holocaust on the Kastner train, but on the other hand was accused of “selling his soul to the devil” by collaborating with the Nazis.
“By saving the Jews on the ‘Kasztner train,’ while failing to warn others that their ‘resettlement’ was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, Kasztner had sacrificed the mass of Jewry for a chosen few,” the judge said.
He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis. The verdict triggered the fall of the Cabinet.
Michaeli is the daughter of Kasztner’s only child, his daughter Zsuzsa. In her inaugural speech to the Knesset, Michaeli described her grandfather as a man who saved “tens of thousands of Jews” by negotiating with Eichmann.
Michaeli is a leading progressive voice in the Knesset.
The Labor party, which led Israel for its first 30 years, dwindled down to only three MK in the previous election: Peretz, Welfare Minister Itzik Shuli, and Michaeli, who joined the opposition due to her fierce opposition to Peretz’s decision to join the Likud/Blue and White unity government despite his promise not to join a Netanyahu government.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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6 Responses
yemach shmoi
rasha
The Labor party, which led Israel for its first 30 years, dwindled down to only three MK in the previous election Believing me, no big loss. We are all so much better off, without Labor Party.
She’s been his grandaughter for the past 54 years. This is not a scope.
But I wonder if the Satmar will support her party given how much Zedi Rudolph did for them.
Labor is out of touch with reality.
these so called religious people are NOT really religious, rather they are hoodlums wearing the external trappings of the religious. They sit and learn but understand only stoopidity.
They and their rabbis will inherit gehennom.
So what? This by itself doesn’t make her a rasha. But if she follows in her zeidi’s ways …..