In 1982, Rabbi Nissim Ze’ev of Jerusalem wanted to register his daughter at an Ashkenazi seminar for girls. He applied to a prestigious girls-only ultra-Orthodox middle school but was turned down. Ze’ev was taken by surprise. At the time, he was already considered a well-known figure within ultra-Orthodox circles, having served as a rabbi both in Mexico and New York. He then realized that the problem stemmed from his family’s Mizrahi origins; he was born in Jerusalem to parents who emigrated from Arab countries. And so, Ze’ev decided to create a school in which girls from Mizrahi families would be accepted. When he tried to raise money from the Jerusalem municipality, a bureaucrat informed him that without political power, his efforts were doomed to fail. But Ze’ev was not deterred, deciding to do exactly that — create a political powerhouse, and that was how the Shas Party was founded 36 years ago. Shas is an ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi party that represents traditional and ultra-Orthodox Jews from Arab lands and was founded for one main reason: to fight against Ashkenazi (of European origin) ultra-Orthodox discrimination against the very community it is supposed to represent.

At first, Shas entered municipal politics, scoring four seats at the Jerusalem municipal council. Then it went on to run in the national election for the 11th Knesset in 1984, where it garnered four Knesset seats. Shas has been present since then at every electoral campaign, reaching at its height 17 Knesset mandates in the 1999 general elections. It has been a dominant political power ever since its establishment, and it has been part of most coalitions, including the present one.

Has Shas succeeded in its mission? “We haven’t made as much as a meter of progress since the founding of Shas,” Shas Knesset member Ya’akov Margi told Al-Monitor, admitting failure. Margi, who is the chairman of the Knesset’s Education Committee, was talking on the backdrop of an investigative report on television that found that ultra-Orthodox yeshivas still discriminate on the basis of community and origin.

In fact, on July 8, the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation Kan TV aired an investigative report that found prestigious ultra-Orthodox yeshivas tailed young students who applied for acceptance, kept them on various lists and even added disparaging terms beside their names. One such term was “Frenck,” a derogatory Yiddish word used in ultra-Orthodox society to describe Jews from Arab countries. In some cases, the boys’ parents were told that their sons would be permitted to study in an Ashkenazi yeshiva provided they paid an acceptance fee amounting to tens of thousands of shekels.