From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Deri posts new Shas ad with family from campaign video that was ordered removed
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Two days after being ordered to remove an election ad featuring a family with an IDF soldier son, Shas chairman Aryeh Deri posts a new campaign video featuring the same family.
The first ad showed a Sephardic family waiting to begin Friday night dinner until their son arrived home from the army and is welcomed by his brother, who studies full-time in a yeshiva. The ad was an apparent bid to hold onto moderate voters turned off by the party’s hardline stance against the IDF drafting ultra-Orthodox men, and the Central Elections Committee ordered it removed over concerns that it violated a ban on using images of security forces in campaign materials.
״הצלח תנועתנו״ pic.twitter.com/MUW0dosHQp
— אריה מכלוף דרעי (@ariyederi) August 25, 2026
The new video features the same family reciting the Havdala prayer at the conclusion of Shabbat, during which the yeshiva student son calls on God to bless Israel’s soldiers, while his brother, wearing an army-green T-shirt and a rifle strap, invokes divine assistance for those studying Torah. The new clip does not show the ostensible soldier in uniform and is framed so as to show only the strap, but not his rifle.
The ad also features a moment during which a disembodied voice calls for God to bring success to “our movement,” while a framed photo of Shas’s founder, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is shown on screen.
After being forced to take down the first ad, Deri posted a series of tweets featuring pictures of IDF soldiers and their families supporting Shas.
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