In Beit Shemesh, neighborhood after neighborhood turns Haredi, squeezing out others

When Daniel moved to the Neve Shamir neighborhood of Beit Shemesh with his family three years ago, he liked that the new community had ample space and catered to a diverse range of religious families.

“This is a neighborhood that offers a nice quality of life,” said Daniel, who bought the home at a discounted price through the government’s Mechir Lemishtaken program for young families. “There’s a range of people living here, mostly Haredi or national-religious, but also a small percentage that are secular. Most of the Haredim here work, and some have gone to the army. Everyone is happy to live together and get along.”

But now, residents of Neve Shamir, otherwise known as Ramat Beit Shemesh Hei, or E — denoting it as the fifth neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh, after A, B, C, and D — are up in arms over plans to turn what was originally going to be a mixed neighborhood into one marketed exclusively to the ultra-Orthodox.

The issue came to the fore in March, after Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf bragged to attendees at an education conference in Beit Shemesh that he had used back channels to claim the neighborhood for their sector.

“What they thought would be for the general public, we found a way to allocate to the Haredi public instead,” Goldknopf was caught on camera saying. “We can’t talk about all the details publicly.”

However, the change in the status of the neighborhood has been public for almost a year.

A new housing project, set to include 3,438 new apartments, is being marketed under the Housing Ministry’s Mehhir LeMatara (target price) program, in which the state arranges with contractors to sell a certain number of housing units at discounted prices.

The tender for the project, which also includes office and commercial space, was first announced in December 2023, just two months after Hamas launched its war against Israel on October 7, 2023.

However, when the tender was actually offered in May 2024, an extra line of text was added to the project description: “It has elements that are appropriate for an ultra-Orthodox population.”

“That was unexpected,” Daniel said.

New neighborhoods

Located in the southeast part of Beit Shemesh, Neve Shamir feels like an active construction site, with rows of apartment buildings in various stages of completion. Just over a thousand families currently live in the neighborhood, out of some 2,000 planned units, said Moshe Shitrit, a member of the Beit Shemesh municipality.

As the neighborhood is still in its infancy, community infrastructure is extremely limited. “It’s only apartment buildings. There are almost no stores here yet, and very few official synagogues,” said Daniel, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his privacy. “We need to drive out to one of the nearby neighborhoods to do our grocery shopping.”

Daniel’s garden is on the edge of a cliff, overlooking other neighborhoods down the road. “After we bought our apartment, we noticed that an open area at the bottom of the cliff was being prepared for building, even though that wasn’t in the official municipal plans. We asked about it, and people refused to give us a straight answer. We found out years later that they want to build 12-story buildings here. This is going to add a lot of congestion to a neighborhood where there isn’t enough infrastructure to begin with.”

According to Daniel, the plan calls for 809 apartments to be built in a row parallel to an existing apartment block of similar size that includes only 210 units. That means it will be full of small, densely packed homes designed for low-income Haredi families.

“The issue at stake is quality of life,” said Shitrit, whose party in the municipality opposes the plan. “You can see in the planning sketches that they want to make the neighborhood more crowded, and add more synagogues while having less infrastructure for culture and sports. The people who bought homes here expected a different type of community.”

“I wouldn’t classify this as a dispute between Haredi and secular communities,” Shitrit said. “Many of the people objecting to the plans are Haredi themselves, but they don’t want to live in an exclusively Haredi neighborhood, which is what this is turning into.”

Turf wars

With a population of some 150,000, Beit Shemesh and its different neighborhoods are no strangers to social conflict. Originally populated by new immigrants from Arab countries in the 1950s, the city was “discovered” in the 1990s by English-speaking immigrants who saw the city as a low-cost suburb located near the country’s two largest cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Haredi groups also started buying homes in Beit Shemesh in the 1990s, and comprised as much as 40 percent of the population by 2011. As the ultra-Orthodox grew in numbers and power, those from national religious or secular communities, which have lower birthrates, were increasingly edged out of neighborhoods. Incidents of forced segregation and religious coercion became increasingly common as “turf wars” took shape around Haredi groups carving out spaces for their religiously stringent lifestyles.

Today, 70% of Beit Shemesh is Haredi, Shitrit said, with a sprawling landscape of enclaves for different communities of varying religious bents or backgrounds.  Broadly speaking, the neighborhoods of Ramat Beit Shemesh A and C are popular with educated Haredi English-speaking immigrants, while Ramat Beit Shemesh B is associated with sects of more extreme ideologies.

“About 10 years ago, as the city continued to expand, Likud made an agreement with the Haredi parties to divide the city,” Shitrit said. “It was decided that Ramat Beit Shemesh D would be Haredi, and Ramat Beit Shemesh E would be for the general population.”

Because part of Ramat Beit Shemesh E was ready before Ramat Beit Shemesh D, many Haredi families also chose to purchase homes there, but were generally respectful of the diversity of views in the predominantly national-religious community.

“There were a handful of extremist families in the community from the beginning, but overall, the community got along really well together,” Daniel said.

The trouble started when planning for the second phase of Ramat Beit Shemesh E began, Shitrit said. “All of a sudden, the Haredim started grabbing it for themselves, saying there was never any agreement. That’s what is happening now with the new tender.”

The Housing Ministry, meanwhile, tells a different version of the story, claiming that facts have changed on the ground.

“It’s very simple. The municipality approached the Housing Ministry and said that while it may have planned for a mixed neighborhood a decade ago, today that no longer reflects the reality,” a spokesperson for the ministry said. “Virtually the entire population is Haredi, and there is no point now in bringing a mixed community there. Not only that, but we have commitments to the contractors who are building there to ensure that the project is marketed successfully, and defining this as a Haredi community from the beginning will help ensure that it is a success.”

Reaching an understanding soon will be crucial to manage similar scuffles that will inevitably arise over the coming years.

Beit Shemesh has been one of Israel’s fastest-growing cities over the past two decades, and an aggressive new master plan for the city looks to more than triple the population to 500,000 in the coming decades. That means that what happens next in this saga will likely set a precedent for future construction plans.

Nationwide trends

The expansion of Haredi communities to new areas isn’t exclusive to the Beit Shemesh area. It’s a nationwide phenomenon attributable largely to demographic and economic factors, explained Hebrew University’s Itschak Trachtengot, who specializes in economic policies for Haredi communities.

“Traditionally, Haredim have always preferred to congregate in their own areas, first in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, and then, starting in the 1980s and 1990s, in satellite cities like Modiin Illit, Elad, Beitar Illit and Beit Shemesh,” Trachtengot said. “But over the years, as their numbers grew and the cost of housing got higher, they started to move into mixed and secular cities and neighborhoods. You can see this in places like Safed, Tiberias, Afula, Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Malachi, Ashdod — many of which are now 25% Haredi or more.”

This is a pattern that is likely to continue to replicate itself, Trachtengot said. A number of discounted Mehir LeMatara projects around the country have been prioritized for the Haredi sector, including communities in Karmei Gat West, Rechasim, and Elad, according to the Hebrew news site Mida.

“It is important to understand that because of the way their community structures are organized, once a certain number of Haredim move into a certain place, many more will come as well,” Trachtengot explained. “Therefore, due to the growth of the community, which now comprises almost 14% of the residents of the State of Israel, it is reasonable to expect that 20 more cities will become Haredi within the next 10 years.”

While government and city officials may not be able to stop this trend, it is important for them to acknowledge this reality and plan for it, Trachtengot said.

“How can you prepare for something like this in advance? The first thing is to find the parts of the Haredi population that are interested in living together with other communities and empower them to create an environment of integration instead of a narrative of isolation,” Trachtengot said. “After that, you have to create employment options that are appropriate for their unique needs.”

These are realities taking place around the country, Trachtengot noted. “If you don’t plan for it, you are going to continue to see the types of conflict you see in Beit Shemesh and elsewhere.”