A bus cooperative for Sabbath riders
A group of Jerusalemites are putting the final touches on Shabus, an alternative for secular residents

No, not Shabbos — Shabus. That’s the name of a new Jerusalem shared transportation cooperative, offering a way to get around the city on Shabbat — Israel’s Friday night-through-Saturday weekend — and Jewish holidays, when there is no public transportation available.
There are laws prohibiting public transportation on Shabbat in Jerusalem, but there’s no prohibition on traveling with private transportation on Shabbat, pointed out Laura Wharton, a Jerusalem city council member from the Meretz party, who is part of the cooperative.
Shabus, said Wharton, is a response to an existing social problem, not a challenge to the religious establishment.
“If you have a car, you can do whatever you want,” explained Wharton. “But because of religious coercion and laws that exist, there’s no public transportation. So if you can’t afford a car or a taxi, you’re trapped.”
The cooperative, whose board members include Wharton and longtime Meretz council member Pepe Alalu, formed the Cooperative Transportation Association of Jerusalem to try to solve the Saturday transportation process for people in Jerusalem, said Wharton.
Shabus offers an alternative, cooperative form of transportation, which will run on Fridays and Saturdays for members of the cooperative — but only for members. Anyone who wants to use the Shabus must join the cooperative.
Egged, the country’s public bus company, does not run most of its buses on Shabbat or Jewish holidays. Service ends on Friday afternoon and resumes Saturday evening, after Shabbat, although buses do run in certain areas such as Haifa, where there is a large non-Jewish population.
The entire subject of public buses in Israel on Shabbat tends to be a sensitive one. Last fall, when daylight saving time went into effect, Egged announced that some intercity bus routes would stop running at an earlier hour on Friday, in order to avoid conflicting with the earlier start of the Jewish Sabbath on Friday evenings. Buses that didn’t change their schedules were arriving at their final destinations after the start of the Sabbath, violating the law of the Ministry of Transportation.
There was a flurry of Knesset debate and blogger discussion about the situation.

Israel’s prohibition of public transportation on Shabbat is based on an understanding created in 1947 between then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion and the Agudat Yisrael movement, which represented the ultra-Orthodox community of that period. That status-quo decision became the basis of many religious-life decisions in Israel, including the issue of public transportation on Shabbat.
“We can’t offer Shabus to the general public,” said Wharton. “That would break the law.”
Instead, the cooperative is offering a NIS 50 membership and has launched a 45-day crowdfunding effort on Headstart. The fundraising campaign aims to get people signed up and to raise NIS 100,000 to cover the costs of advertising and to settle a weekly arrangement with a private transportation company.
The plan is to start operating Shabus by Passover — “the symbolic holiday of freedom,” commented Wharton — when people want to travel around the city.
“It’s the most frustrating thing for Jerusalemites,” continued Wharton. “There are so many places that are open, restaurants and museums and the zoo, but you can’t get to them if you don’t have a car.”
Shabus’s maiden route would head from Neve Yaakov at the northern tip of the city, through downtown and then south, toward Gilo.
“The people who live in those areas have the biggest problem,” claimed Wharton. “I live in Beit Hakerem and have walked home from places in the center of town [on Shabbat]. We wanted to deal with the people with the most critical problem.”
The second route being tentatively discussed would run from west to east and travel from Ein Kerem and Beit Hakerem through Kiryat Hayovel. It could also go to the hospitals, added Wharton, because there is no other way to reach the major hospitals without taking a private car or cab.
The cooperative has been working together for about a year, Wharton said. They formed a charter for the association, and then hired a lawyer and an accountant, with the aim of making sure that Shabus could be feasible economically.
“It’s not just a gimmick, we really want it to work,” she commented.
It’s not the first time there have been efforts to create a transportation alternative for weekends in Jerusalem. In 2012, the Hebrew University’s student union tried to operate a van service enabling students to get from campus to the city’s downtown area on Friday nights. At the time, Alalu submitted a proposal to the city council, suggesting the operation of a small number of bus lines to facilitate transportation for students on Friday nights.
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According to Wharton, there are thousands of Jerusalemites — if not tens of thousands — who could be part of the cooperative. Some 20% of Jerusalem’s population is secular and many of them don’t have cars or are students who don’t have cars yet, she said.
The Shabus board is just handling Jerusalem for now, added Wharton. But it could work anywhere in the country.
“As long as it’s a cooperative and not a public company, it’s groups of people coordinating together,” Wharton explained. “This is something I believe in for any field: If you have a problem and the government and authorities aren’t helping solve it, organize. It’s a real positive model of grassroots organizations working for the benefit of their residents.”
If the government policy were ever to change, and allowed Egged to operate on Shabbat, the cooperative would “happily defer to Egged,” said the council member.
“Our understanding is that it won’t happen for now, so we wanted to provide an alternative,” explained Wharton. “We’re not asking for public funding or to change the policy; we’re just trying to help people move around on Saturdays, to get into town or visit friends or family. It’s a special movement to overcome limitations that now exist.”
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