For months, the social-media feeds, the secular studios and the well-funded campaigns, some of them in chareidi outlets, sold a story: the chareidi street was "boiling over", the public had had enough of the "dealmakers", and a revolution of "modern chareidim" was about to shatter the walls of the United Torah Judaism and Shas establishments.
Moti Leitner and his party, HaTzibur HaHaredi (ballot letter zayin-kaf), set out to split the community from within. They issued bold declarations about "breaking the barrier of fear" and promised a new alternative.
But as the count progressed in the elections to the 26th Knesset, more than 12,160 polling stations and overseas envelopes tallied, that disconnected thesis met the plain chareidi reality: a crushing defeat, a resounding failure, and numbers that did not scratch a tenth of a seat.
An analysis of the official, updated voting data for zayin-kaf by locality and neighborhood presents a ridiculous mirror image and delivers a sharp, unambiguous verdict: the reform stayed on Twitter and in Facebook groups, and the public, from one end to the other, remained loyal to the gedolei Yisrael, or in some cases, to Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The embarrassing arithmetic: ₪1,340 per ballot slip
Leitner himself boasted just days before the election that his party had raised a massive budget of around ₪13 million.
When you place that sum against the updated result at the polls, 9,695 votes across the entire country (0.18% of valid votes), you get the most absurd cost-benefit ratio in the history of Israeli politics: roughly ₪1,341 spent for every single vote.
While the threshold required around 173,000 votes (3.25%), his party scraped together just 5.6% of the entry threshold to the Knesset. While Leitner scattered slogans about "tens of thousands of working chareidim looking for a home", it turned out that even inside his own home, the public did not bother to take his ballot slip.
The humiliation parade - in the chareidi strongholds themselves
The figure that ridicules the pretension of breaking up and splitting the chareidi public more than any other is the distribution in the distinctly chareidi population centers:
Modi'in Illit: In the city where turnout rates soar, Leitner received just 67 votes in the Kiryat Sefer neighborhood (0.42%), 21 votes in Neot HaPisgah (0.43%), 19 votes in Achuzat Brachfeld (0.23%), and only 6 votes in Green Park. It turns out that even right-wing parties that are not chareidi swept up several times more protest votes in the city.
Bnei Brak: HaTzibur HaCharedi received just 758 votes across the entire city. A check of the neighborhoods reveals a double absurdity: in the mainstream Lithuanian and Hasidic neighborhoods, the party was almost nonexistent (in Kiryat Vizhnitz just 11 votes, and in Kiryat HaYeshiva 6 votes). Nearly a third of all its votes in the city came from peripheral neighborhoods such as Tel Giborim (125 votes) and Pardes Katz (112 votes).
Beitar Illit and Elad: In Elad, the party scraped together just 150 votes (0.67%), and in Beitar Illit it made do with crumbs in the various neighborhoods (HaTamar 55 votes, HaGefen 53 votes, HaDekel 40 votes, and HaEtrog 35 votes).
The legend of "masses of bnei Torah and avreichim who have had enough" evaporated as though it had never been; the chareidi public simply shut the door on the attempt to split the ranks.
From "municipal success" to political bankruptcy
If there is one figure that illustrates just how much Leitner's campaign suffered from absolute delusions of grandeur, it is the polling station in Beit Shemesh, the city where it all began, his home base and the foundation on which the entire fantasy of a national run was built.
As will be recalled, only in the municipal elections did Leitner enter the city council with the "Derech" faction, which swept up two full seats, giving him the status of deputy mayor and prestigious portfolios. That local success went to his head: he convinced himself, and the donors who poured in millions, that the two municipal seats were a launch pad for a national revolution that would sweep masses of haredim into the Knesset.
But when the national test arrived, reality slapped him in the face with full force:
Out of tens of thousands of valid votes cast in Beit Shemesh, the zayin-kaf party managed to scrape together just 1,536 votes.
In other words: even the local voters who cast ballots for him in the council elections out of narrow municipal considerations understood perfectly well the difference between local politics and an attempt to split and harm United Torah Judaism and Shas at the national level and turned their backs on him completely.
The internal distribution in Beit Shemesh also proves the extent of the disconnect: nearly a third of all his votes in the city rested on a single neighborhood alone, Ramat HaNechalim (483 votes), alongside community-modern neighborhoods such as Ramat Avi Ezri (178), Neve Shamir (176), Dovev Meisharim (160), Ramat Ezra (123), and Mishkafayim (121). By contrast, in the core haredi concentrations of Beit Shemesh he was completely erased (in the Kiryah HaHaredit just 6 votes, 0.23%).
To set out on a national adventure of ₪13 million when your home base is barely worth a seat and a half on a city council, and to discover that at the moment of truth the overwhelming majority of the city's residents refused to put your ballot slip in the box, that is not just a failure, it is an instructive lesson in political humility. Now, with Leitner left with zero seats in the Knesset and growing calls in Beit Shemesh to remove him from the municipal coalition, it turns out that the road from city council to Knesset was not paved, but led straight into a political abyss.
The "modern haredim" bluff: where exactly do they live?
The central argument of Leitner's headquarters and the trumpets on the networks was that the party was built on the backs of the "new chareidim", the people of academia, high-tech and the mixed neighborhoods. The data show what that "base" actually looks like in practice:
Petach Tikvah shot to the top: with 619 votes (more than all of Modi'in Illit, Elad and Beitar Illit combined), the bulk of support in the city was concentrated in neighborhoods with a distinctly religious-Zionist hue: Kfar Ganim B (117 votes), Hadar Ganim (108 votes), HaMerkaz HaSheket (101 votes), and Lev HaMoshava (81 votes).
The bloom in Rechavia and Katamon: In Jerusalem (2,413 votes in total), alongside Ramot (304) and Har Nof (182), which are populated by Anglo-Saxon communities, hundreds of votes were recorded specifically in neighborhoods such as Katamon HaYeshana (147 votes), Rechavia (125 votes), Gonenim (101 votes), Kiryat HaYovel (100 votes), and the French Hill (88 votes).
The Beit Shemesh bubble: The locality in which the party tried to demonstrate a presence leaned on dedicated communities in the Ramat HaNechalim and Neve Shamir areas, a niche audience that in no way represents the broad charedi public.
"Knesset compound" in second place: The second-largest "hub" in the country where votes for zayin-kaf were recorded, after the Ramat HaNechalim neighborhood, is not a city and not a haredi neighborhood, but the "Knesset compound" (the envelopes folded from the accessible polling stations, the overseas ballots of soldiers, prisoners and embassies), which contributed 352 votes to the party.
Leitner looked for haredim and found voters in Alon Shvut and Efrat
The most resounding absurdity revealed from the official data file is not limited to the total crash in the classic chareidi concentrations, but to the actual identity of those who bothered at all to slip the zayin-kaf ballot into the box.
While the party's leaders scattered arrogant promises about a sweep of tens of thousands of working haredim disgusted with the mainstream, an in-depth check reveals a ridiculously absurd mirror image: the "HaTzibur HaCharedi" party failed completely to penetrate the chareidi public, and instead picked up leftover votes and ideological spillovers specifically from distinctly religious-Zionist and chardal concentrations in the settlements.
For example, the party's notable support percentages were recorded in localities and neighborhoods such as Alon Shvut with 2.73% (52 votes), Matatiyahu with 4.48% (20 votes), Efrat with dozens of votes (Givat HaZayit 33, Tamar 22, Dekel 20, Te'ena 14, HaGefen 13), Beit Rimon with 2.54% (13 votes), Tekoa with 38 votes (1.77%), and Rotem with 3.79%, which is a total of five individual votes.
On the other hand, in places where the real voting potential of baalei teshuvah, chareIdi academics and members of the sector in the large metropolitan and mixed cities resides, the party simply disappeared and did not exist on the ground. In all of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Leitner picked up individual votes scattered mainly in the old north (21 and 20 votes), in the heart of Tel Aviv (17 votes), and in Kikar HaMedinah (15 votes). In Haifa, only crumbs were recorded (Neve Sha'anan 22 votes, Hadar Elyon 20 votes, Geulah 18 votes), and in Ashdod, a city with a huge haredi and traditional community, the entire "storm" amounted to District 7 with just 33 votes (0.35%), District 6 (29 votes), District 8 (11 votes), and District 3 (11 votes).
This gap sharpens the dimensions of the bluff: beyond an expensive and noisy campaign on the networks, no new haredi force arose, and the pretension to split the public from within shattered when it turned out that even the few ballot slips he collected, Leitner picked up on the margins of religious Zionism and not in the haredi street, which shut the door in his face with contempt.
The networks burned but the ballot boxes laughed
This election campaign accompanied itself with unbearable noise on the networks:
On the pro-Leitner side: they promised in inflamed posts "tens of thousands who will arrive at the Binyanei HaUmah", spoke of "breaking the dealmaker dictatorship", and the general press rushed to glorify the "civic revolution".
On the chareidi side: they warned against the dangerous attempt to throw precious right-wing votes in the trash, to harm the power of the haredi parties fighting for the Torah world, and to create an artificial buffer within the sector.
At the end of the day, Leitner's delusional victory speeches on the night of the exit polls about a "spark of hope that was ignited" became the sector's network joke. When you burn ₪13 million and bring in fewer than 1,000 votes in all of Bnei Brak and Elad combined, that is not a "spark of hope", it is the complete crash of a public-relations campaign with no grip on the ground.
The ChareIdi public proved once again: arguments, internal criticism and pointed questions always exist, but at the moment of truth, obedience to the instruction of the gedolei and me'orei hador and unity around the Torah world defeat every passing media gimmick.
