Haaretz:

Kiryat Gat was without a movie theater for 17 years. And then, for a full eight months, it finally had one. But Wednesday saw the last picture show in town. It took a year and a half, but pressure from the ultra-Orthodox led to the theater’s closure. For the non-ultra-Orthodox residents of the southern town, it’s back to a familiar routine – an occasional Indian film at the local community center, or a trip to Be’er Sheva. “The Holy One, blessed be He, won,” exulted Rabbi Moshe Havlin, head of the town’s Chabad yeshiva. Hevlin led the boycott by ultra-Orthodox consumers of the Lev Ha’ir mall, which the owners dared to keep open on the Sabbath, and where the theater was located. When the Globus Group realized it would not be able to open the four-theater multiplex on Shabbat, the company decided it would not be viable to continue to operate only on weekdays. About 18 months ago, when news broke of plans to open a mall in Kiryat Gat where movies would be shown on the Sabbath, the town’s ultra-Orthodox mayors joined together to organize a mass rally, with petitions and protests against the desecration of the Sabbath. At first, the battle seemed to have been lost; the mall, and the movie theater, opened and stayed open on Shabbat. A coalition of religiously observant and ultra-Orthodox forces then organized a consumer boycott….