‘I cannot walk freely in my city,’ says Beit Shemesh mayor after assault by Haredi mob

Following Thursday night’s mob attack in which dozens of ultra-Orthodox extremists assaulted him and his family, Beit Shemesh Mayor Shmuel Greenberg laments that his freedom of movement is restricted due to threats against him.

In an interview with the Walla news site in the wake of the incident, during which his car was overturned and his teenage son was lightly wounded, Greenberg, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Degel Hatorah party, asks “How is this possible?”

Video from the scene showed black-clad Hasidic Jews rocking the vehicle back and forth while someone screamed in the background. Another clip showed the mayor, wearing a helmet, being rushed out of a building by armored police as a baying mob chased him amid shouts of “Nazi.” He was then placed in another car and rushed from the scene.

“I am the mayor here but I am also a human being. I cannot walk freely in my city. The city is supposed to be a public space where everyone can walk without fear,” he says.

Greenberg — a clean-shaven former IDF serviceman with a master’s degree in public policy who until recently served as a senior education official in the Jerusalem Municipality — has earned the ire of more extreme segments of the Haredi population in Beit Shemesh over his administration’s orders to dismantle illegally built structures, including synagogues.

“It was a feeling of real danger to my life. The police demanded that I put on a helmet — they threw stones, sticks and bottles at me. Without the police, it would have ended differently,” Greenberg tells Walla.

For the extremists, “I am a symbol of the government. At a time like this when the Haredi are trying to oppose the government in every way, every symbol becomes a target,” he adds.

The incident was far from the first mob attack against the mayor of Beit Shemesh.

In August 2023, in the second attack in less than two months, dozens of extremists rioted outside a local school while then-mayor Aliza Bloch was touring the building. The rioters hurled objects, started a fire and vandalized her car — effectively holding her hostage for nearly two hours until she was rescued by police.

While violence has decreased significantly in recent years, extremists have long sought to forcibly impose their way of life on residents, posting modesty signs, tearing down Israeli flags and burning down a cellphone store in the moderate Haredi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef last year.